PRAISE FOR NATIVE BELIEVER
âEterazâs publisher has taken an admirable risk with âNative Believer.â I found myself wondering â as I sped through its pages with alternating interest, awe and queasiness â whether Eteraz had set out purposefully to challenge his imagined readership, to engage in a kind of ânoble protestâ against the demands of literary commerce. I believe this novel will offend as many readers as it captivates. It is unflinching in its willingness to transgress taboos, whether those taboos are religious, sexual or both. And in the end, âNative Believerâ stands as an important contribution to American literary culture: a book quite unlike any Iâve read in recent memory, which uses its characters to explore questions vital to our continuing national discourse around Islam. This is a novel that says (to borrow a line from AimĂ© CĂ©saireâs âDiscourse on Colonialismâ), âAny civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.â
âNew York Times Book Review | Editors Choice Announcement.
"M.'s life spins out of control after his boss discovers a Qur'an in M.'s house during a party, in this wickedly funny Philadelphia picaresque about a secular Muslim's identity crisis in a country waging a never-ending war on terror."
âO, The Oprah Magazine, Summer Reading List, 2016
"This is a brilliant, unapologetic book...It's also the perfect book for our times. In a just world it would be awarded a place alongside other great civil rights books. However, it will probably just end up being banned and scorned by the self-righteous and the blind; the ones who need to read and understand it the most."
âQantara.de
"Eteraz's narrative is witty and unpredictable...and the darkly comic ending is pleasingly macabre. As for M., in this identity-obsessed dandy, Eteraz has created a perfect protagonist for the times. A provocative and very funny exploration of Muslim identity in America today."
âKirkus Reviews
âIn bitingly funny prose, first novelist Eteraz (known for his memoir, Children of Dust) sums up the pain and contradictions of an American not wanting to be categorized; the ending is a bang-up surprise.â
âLibrary Journal, Top Spring Indies Fiction Selection
â[In] this poignant and profoundly funny first novelâŠEteraz combines masterful storytelling with intelligent commentary to create a nuanced work of social and political art.â
âBooklist
âIn reviewing books I am often drawn to wonder why a publisher selected this or that author for publication. In too many cases, the question is unanswerable. In the case of Native Believer, it is crystal clear. Ali Eteraz is a master storyteller. Native Believer brings out the angst of a population caught between world events and assimilation into a fear-ridden culture. It is to Eterazâs credit that he is unapologetic, and nods in admiration to those immigrants who have come before. Believer or non-believer, you wonât look at the local mosque the same after reading this excellent work.â
âInternet Review of Books
âSet in Philadelphia, M is Muslim by birth only, a second-generation immigrant, but when his boss fires him after discovering a copy of the Quran in his home, M must try to find his place in a country set against him in the War on Terror. A highly provocative and completely unmissable debut.â
âamreading.com
âAli Eteraz' Native Believer, a new and very funny, wacky and also sometimes painful novel about a contemporary secular Muslim-American guy who gets discriminated against on the job and then goes off the radar and into a kind of Islamic anarchic underground alternative scene in Philadelphia. It's really brilliant and very charming. I was laughing really hard on the train reading it and people were looking at me funny.â
âBookculture.com
âEteraz is a brave writer whose narrative immerses you in a world of fear, doubt, identity crises, and paranoia. He exposes the mind of the American citizen separated from the norm because of who he is, was, or could be. Native Believer is a relevant book and should be read for its fine prose.â
âJaggeryLit
âLike these five novelists, Ali Eteraz, author of the debut novel Native Believer, is an immigrant; he came from the Dominican Republic and Pakistan to New York, where he yearned to âproduce stories that would be deemed quintessentially American.â As an adult he read Richard Wright on American disenfranchisement, and then found his own way to write a sad, funny, and haunting novel that debates what America is. The novel captures post-9/11 U.S. in a brilliant satire.â
âRainTaxi
âThere are parallels between Mohsin Hamidâs dark narrative, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Ali Eterazâs equally troubling novel, Native Believer.â
âCounterpunch
âKnife-sharp and ruthlessly funny, Native Believer is the American novel of now. Right now. Eterazâs writing is exciting, beautiful, and jam-packed with intelligent surprise. I saw myself among its infidels and dreamers, its pornographers and heathens, its believers, the lovers, and the lost. I could not put it down.â
âScott Cheshire, author of High as the Horsesâ Bridles
âAli Eteraz has written a hurricane of a novel. It blows open the secrets and longings of Muslim immigration to the West, sweeping us up in the drama of identity in ways newly raw. This is no poised and prettified tale; buckle in for a uproariously messy and revealing ride.â
âLorraine Adams, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of The Room and the Chair
âMerciless, intellectually lacerating, and brutally funny, Native Believer is not merely a Gonzo panorama of Muslim Americaâitâs one of the most incisive novels Iâve ever read on America itself. Eteraz paints our empire with the same erotic longing and black, depraved wit that Nabokov used sixty years ago in Lolita. But whereas Nabokovâs work was set in the heyday of Americaâs cheerful upswing, Eteraz sets the country in the new, fractious world order. Here, sex, money, and violence all stake their claims on treacherously shifting identitiesâand neither love nor god is an escape.â
âMolly Crabapple, contributing editor VICE, author of Drawing Blood
âAli Eteraz has written a novel, both heartbreaking and exultant, about how it feels to get scalded by the great melting pot. He is a writer of tremendous nuance, sensitivity, and insight. An enormous triumph in its own right, Native Believer also points toward an even brighter future for American fiction.â
âAndrew Ervin, author of Burning Down George Orwellâs House
Prior Praise for Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz:
âA gifted writer and scholar, Eteraz is able to create a true-life Islamic bildungsroman as he effortlessly conveys his coming-of-age tale while educating the reader ⊠His catharsis transcends the page.âÂ
âPublishers Weekly
âThe gripping story of a young man exposed to both the beauty and ugliness of religion.âÂ
âLaila Lalami, author of The Moorâs Account
âAn astoundingly frightening, funny, and brave book. At a time when debate and reform in the larger landscape of the Muslim world, and in countries like Pakistan in particular, are virtually non-existent, Children of Dust is a call to thought.âÂ
âFatima Bhutto, author of The Shadow of the Crescent Moon
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