Category: goodies to go

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.