Dinner with Osama

Advance Praise for Dinner with Osama

Marilyn Krysl is one of our most gifted, quirky, and delightful storytellersunpredictable, 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 Krysls 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 motheror even (Are We Dwelling Deep Yet?) a Great Motherwho needs to save and feed the world however she can. Its north and south must be Mitosis, Krysls 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 Osamayes, that Osamathrough 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 termthe political lyric, perhapsto describe the airy speech and inspired story in Marilyn Krysls 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