Join us at The Book Cellar to hear Sahar Mustafah read from her new
novel The Beauty of Your Face. She will be in conversation with
Christine Rice, author of Swarm Theory. About The Beauty of Your Face:
A Palestinian American woman wrestles with faith, loss, and identity
before coming face- to- face with a school shooter in this searing
debut. A uniquely American story told in powerful, evocative prose,
The Beauty of Your Face navigates a country growing ever more divided.
Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal
of Nurrideen School for Girls, a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs.
One morning, a shooter- radicalized by the online alt- right- attacks
the school. As Afaf listens to his terrifying progress, we are swept
back through her memories: the bigotry she faced as a child, her
mother's dreams of returning to Palestine, and the devastating
disappearance of her older sister that tore her family apart. Still,
there is the sweetness of the music from her father's oud, and the
hope and community Afaf finally finds in Islam. The Beauty of Your
Face is a profound and poignant exploration of one woman's life in a
nation at odds with its ideals. About Sahar Mustafah: Sahar Mustafah
is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, a richly complex
inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her short stories have been
awarded the Guilt Literary Complex Prize for fiction, a Distinguished
Story honor from Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize
nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination, among other honors.
About Swarm Theory: It was a time of hippies, heroin, and All in the
Family. It was a time, in the small town of New Canaan--a fictional
town in mid-Michigan--when developers gobbled up farmland and spit out
subdivisions. Against this backdrop, Swarm Theory's interlocking
narratives reveal the troubled lives of Astrid (a young woman trying
to hold her family together), Caroline (Astrid's best friend who has
lost her mother to heroin), Will (a soldier struggling to make sense
of life after being discharged from the Marines), and Father Maurice
Silver (a priest caring for a young man dying of AIDS). Nothing in New
Canaan is quite what it seems. Swarm Theory is a book that reveals
life's amazing contradictions--the wonderful and the profane, devotion
and infidelity, understanding and revenge--through stories told from
different perspectives. These stories investigate what happens when
people come together--whether to do admirable or horrific things.
Here, intimates and strangers alike can't help but be intertwined;
their unpredictable journeys providing a backdrop for characters
complex, honorable, and not. Swarm Theory reveals our often misguided,
dark, and life-sustaining dependency on each other. About Christine
Rice: Christine Rice stories have been published in Roanoke College's
Roanoke Review, American University of Beirut's Rusted Radishes,
Farleigh Dickinson University's The Literary Review, and online at
Chicago Literati and Bird's Thumb. Her writing has appeared in the
Chicago Tribune, Detroit Metro Times, The Good Men Project, The
Urbaness.com, CellStories.net, F Magazine and her radio essays have
been produced by WBEZ Chicago. Christine is the managing editor of
Hypertext Magazine and the director of Hypertext Studio Writing
Center. She also teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at
Columbia College Chicago and is the 2015 recipient of the Ragdale
Rubin Fellowship.
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12/04/2020 Last update