Advance Praise for Dinner with Osama
"Marilyn Krysl is one of our most gifted, quirky, and delightful
storytellers--unpredictable, funny, and wildly inventive in wondrous
ways. Her new collection shows her at the top of her form as she details
the ordinary, the absurd, and the apocalyptic in outrageous and deeply
affecting ways." --Jay Neugeboren, author of 1940 and News from the
New American Diaspora
"Marilyn Krysl's astonishing Dinner with Osama somehow finds the
intersection between deep anguish at the state of the world and
brilliant, caustic, and hilarious sociopolitical satire of America
post-9/11. Its effrontery is peculiarly female, its fierce intelligence
that of a mother--or even ('Are We Dwelling Deep Yet?') a Great
Mother--who needs to save and feed the world however she can. Its north
and south must be 'Mitosis, ' Krysl's heartbreaking life history of a
young Dinka woman whose way of life, and source of food, have been
destroyed by civil war in Sudan; its east and west is surely the title
story, in the voice of a politically irreproachable matriarch of
Boulder, Colorado, who does her part by extending a dinner invitation to
Osama--yes, that Osama--through her 'pal' Abdullah at the local gyros
stand; and Osama not only receives it, he accepts. Israelis and
Palestinians, 'conflict'-addicted cliché-mongers of the creative writing
workshop, violent extremists of every stripe, and above all the wealthy
consumerist left are all skewered in this miraculous collection."
--Jaimy Gordon, author of Bogeywoman and She Drove Without Stopping
"We may have to invent a new term--'the political lyric, ' perhaps--to
describe the 'airy speech and inspired story' in Marilyn Krysl's
brilliant new collection of short fiction, Dinner with Osama. What
holds all the fiction together, as much as the impassioned political and
cultural concerns that inform them, is the writing, which is lyrical in
the best sense, lyrical as in musical, expressive, and vivid." --Ed
Falco, author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and
Selected Stories
