Laila Lalami

This week, I’m giving away a copy of Los Angeles-based novelist Lisa Teasley’s new book Heat Signature. Heat charts the emotional journey of loss, as a young man tries to cope with the murder of his mother, which occurred sixteen years ago. The book has already received great reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.

The first person to send me an email with the subject “Heat” gets the book. Also be sure to include your mailing address.

Update: The winner is Cigdem A. from Toronto.

This week, I’m giving away a copy of T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk, which just came out last month. Of the novel, the Washington Post’s Ron Charles wrote: “Talk Talk grabs hold of the fragile structures that establish who we are and what we own and shakes them apart. Considering Boyle’s recent subjects — sex research (The Inner Circle), hippies (Drop City), environmental apocalypse (A Friend of the Earth) — it’s remarkable that his most exciting novel yet should focus on the tedium of ruined credit scores and fraudulent drivers’ licenses. But Talk Talk benefits from Boyle’s highbrow/lowbrow style: He knows how to drill down through the surface of everyday life into our core anxieties, and he knows how to write constantly charging, heart-thumping chase scenes.”

As usual, the first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Boyle.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Rebecca H. from Bethel, Connecticut.

My last giveaway for today is Ronit Chacham’s Breaking Ranks: Refusing to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a collection of interviews with members of the Israeli Defense Force about why they refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. These refuseniks’ account is more topical today than ever, when Israel is bombing Lebanon and Gaza, and when more than 600 civilians have already paid the price of this folly.

As usual, the first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Chacham.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Donna S., from San Antonio, Texas.

I’m doing another giveaway today: Jami Attenberg’s Instant Love, which the author kindly signed when she came through Portland last month. Told through the alternating points of view of several women, the novel focuses on the difficulty of making connections and forming relationships. Some of you may already know Attenberg through her blog, whatever-whenever.net, or through her many published writings, including, most recently, this great piece for Nextbook.

So. The first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Attenberg.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Shabana S. from New York, New York. There will be another book given away later today. Good luck.

This week, I am doing several giveaways, scattered throughout the day. The first is a copy of Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, a debut novel by a young French-Algerian author. It’s a coming-of-age story set in one of Paris’s infamous cités, and it has been praised by Sandra Cisneros (”a tale for anyone who has ever lived outside looking in”), and, uh, me (”moving and irreverent”). It’s also received quite a bit of attention, from the NYT to the SF Chronicle to Salon.

You know the drill: The first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Kiffe Kiffe.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Beau G. from Chicago, Illinois. There will be another book given away later this morning. Good luck.

I have a very special giveaway for one lucky reader this week: A signed first edition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. This graphic memoir tells of Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her closeted gay father, Bruce, and of the discovery of her own sexuality. It’s set in a small Pennsylvania town, where Bruce Bechdel ran a funeral home (the ‘fun home’ of the title), where he taught high school English, and where he spent years restoring his house, an 1857 Gothic revival house. It’s an honest and bittersweet portrait of a father-daughter relationship, and easily the best graphic memoir of this year.

The title page reads “To a Moorishgirl.com reader” and is signed by Alison Bechdel. (You can thank Alex for this. I was in DC that night, giving a reading myself, but he took an extra copy and had it signed.) The first reader to write gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Bechdel.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded. Update: The winner is Sheila O. from Jackson, MS.

This week, I’d like to give away a copy of Sayed Kashua’s second novel, Let It Be Morning, translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger. (You can read a review of Kashua’s first book, Dancing Arabs, in the Moorishgirl archive.) In Let It Be Morning, the unnamed narrator moves his family from Jerusalem back to his native village of Tira, in the Galilee, where he hopes that life will be more bearable. Within a few days however, Israeli tanks surround the village, without warning. Is it an attack? A siege? Or something entirely different? It’s a gripping tale of displacement, isolation, and belonging. The first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Kashua.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Shelley E., from Queens, New York.

This week, I’d like to give away Steve Erickson’s latest novel Our Ecstatic Days. In his Washington Post review, Bill Sheehan wrote of the novel:

for all its convolutions and stylistic excesses — and for all the demands it makes on the reader’s patience — it is the work of a serious writer with a singular, deeply personal vision. By the end, this messy, ambitious novel pulls itself together, illuminating a society in which chaos almost — but never quite — wins, in which primal human connections, particularly the connection between parents and children, keep us going in the face of catastrophic loss. Our Ecstatic Days is a baroque, visionary novel rooted in fundamental truths, and is well worth the considerable effort it requires.

The first reader to write in with the titles of two of Erickson’s previous books wins this one. Please use the subject line “Erickson.” And please send a mailing address, so we can both save time. Good luck!

Update: The winner is Rich J. from Philadelphia.

This week, I’m giving away a copy of Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, translated by John Cullen. The novel is about a Palestinian-Israeli surgeon named Amin Jaafari, who is on duty when victims of a suicide bombing are brought in to the emergency room. Among the dead and dismembered, he discovers the body of his wife, and learns that she played a crucial role in the attack. The book has received two reviews in the New York Times, one by Janet Maslin, the other by Lorraine Adams, and is sure to get more attention from the media. For my money, though, the best review I’ve read of Khadra’s work appeared a couple of years ago in the London Review of Books. Check it out.

The third person to correctly answer this question gets the book: What is Yasmina Khadra’s real name? Please use the subject line “The Attack” in your email. And please include your street address. Previous winners excluded. Update: The winner is Richard G. from Brooklyn, New York.

This week, I’m giving away a copy of Etgar Keret’s The Nimrod Flipout, translated by Miriam Schlesinger and Sondra Silverston. It’s a collection of thirty of Keret’s short stories, including the bizarre and wonderful “Fatso,” which you can listen to here, read by Ira Glass.

You know how it works: The first person to send me an email with the subject line, “Nimrod” gets the book. Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded, of course.

Update: The winner is Michael T. from Amherst, New York.