Ali Eteraz – Sangat Book Review

Birth—
Where—Lahore
Raised in— Middle East, Pakistan and the Caribbean
Education—Emory University
Currently—San Fransisco

Bibliography

Native Believer (2016)
Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (2014)
Children Of Dust (2009)

Ali Eteraz is an American writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He grew up in the Caribbean, South Asia, and the American South.

He is the author of the short story collection Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (Guernica Ed. 2014). Other stories have appeared in storySouth, Chicago Quarterly Review, Akashic, Crossborder, and Forge Journal, among others. His first story, Tyranny, was a finalist for a Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. In 2014, his story, Iron Bowl, was long-listed for The Million Writers Award.

Eteraz is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Children of Dust (HarperCollins, 2009). It was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year and was featured on PBS with Tavis Smiley, NPR with Terry Gross, C-SPAN2, and numerous international outlets. O, The Oprah Magazine, called it “a picaresque journey” and the book was long-listed for the Asian American Writer’s Workshop Award.

Eteraz is an accomplished essayist and has been spotlighted by Time Magazine and Pageturner, the literary blog of the New Yorker. In 2014, Eteraz won the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize judged by novelist and NYTimes book columnist Mohsin Hamid. In 2015, he served as an art consultant to Jenny Holzer, for a permanent art installation in Qatar.

Eteraz graduated magna cum laude from Emory University; was a Fellow at the US Dept. of Justice; and worked as a lawyer in Manhattan. He is an inhabitant of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto.

Native Believer (2016)
Ali Eteraz
There are parallels between Mohsin Hamid’s dark narrative, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Ali Eteraz’s equally troubling novel, Native Believer. Perhaps you remember Hamid’s main character’s increasing disaffection with the United States—in part triggered by 9/11—and his eventual decision to return to Lahore, the city of his birth.

Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (2014)
Ali Eteraz
I found this book immensely readable because of Eteraz’s control of language and lightness. He brought the dusty and sanitized world of the Persian Gulf into exquisite focus with the same breath that he could describe a warring faction in Ancient Arabia

THE WOMAN IN THE SCORPION ABAYA
Ali Eteraz
A WOMAN with a large sequin scorpion on the back of her flowing black abaya started coming to the Lagoon, the mall on Amwaj Island in Bahrain.
Ishaq Rahman was a swarthy American of Pakistani descent, tall, with lightly tattooed arms, who lived in al-Firdaws Towers and spent a great deal of time at the mall. He went by the name of Aesch. He became intrigued by the woman in the scorpion abaya.

Birth— Where—Lahore Raised in— Middle East, Pakistan and the Caribbean Education—Emory University Currently—San Fransisco

Bibliography

Native Believer (2016)

Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (2014)

Children Of Dust (2009)

Birth—
Where—Lahore
Raised in— Middle East, Pakistan and the Caribbean
Education—Emory University
Currently—San Fransisco