Brother Alive

Product Information

Zain Khalid Wins The New York Public Library's Twenty-Third Young Lions Fiction Award". The New York Public Library . Retrieved 2023-09-25.

Brother Alive is a stunning achievement—conceptually daring, endlessly surprising, and rich with moral and intellectual questions that match the beauty of Zain Khalid’s prose and the fullness of his imagination."— NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award judge Jessamine Chan MBIt also felt like your editor reciprocated that trust. For instance, the novel’s four parts work within different genres. It’s unusual but it works. Was that your intent? The action shifts from lower-class Staten Island in post-9/11 world to Salim's story of from whom and why he got these kids. This is interesting, but it's really lightly gone over, and is the set-up for the final section set in The Line, Saudi Arabia's astounding city of the future that they're building with the oceans of money petrochemical exploitation has given them permission to create using slave labor from around the developing world. (This isn't foregrounded, but there's a strong streak of anti-capitalism in Zain Khalid's anti-colonialism. These are very agreeable qualities to me, but note their presence before deciding to make a run at this long, magisterially paced book.) It is in this last section that I lost my sense of the author being in full control of his narrative. A disease process, the shift of Brother from a child's fantasy key to a very different one as Youssef, now a gay young adult, resumes the narrative's reins.Haldane's Demand: On Zain Khalid's "Brother Alive" ". Cleveland Review of Books . Retrieved 2023-09-25.

I make this suggestion because Zain Khalid's Brother Alive has a lot going on. A. LOT. What I propose to do here is to discuss the three sections into which the novel is divided with some reflection on prose and plotting, but I won't be providing a summary. The publisher has done a much better job of that than I could. ZK Actually, I’m kind of done with many of these themes. I’m no longer interested in telling a story that in any way mirrors my own journey. Rather, I am writing almost archetypal stories that are less rooted in place, and perhaps more rooted in the surreal. There are a couple of stories I’m working on now that are entirely surreal—I have a short story coming out about a constipated despot, who thinks that her constipation is evidence of her looming death. I’m interested in realism too, but an entropic reality, beauty in the recognition that anything can happen—and a lot does. Thus Khalid has charted a novelist’s route out of the central problem of Kant’s critical philosophy, the mind’s irresistible need to question things it can’t possibly know. By accepting, with Gödel, that none of his characters, in the literary logic that constructs them, can be consistent and complete, and that they must oscillate between overlapping, at times conflicting states of singularity and plurality, Khalid has responded to Kant by reversing his central impulse. Where Kant systematically divides conceptual categories in search of precision in thought, Khalid declares the porousness and constant mutability of those divisions, allowing him to write psychological and physical relationships with dynamics little-explored outside the more adventurous segments of contemporary neuroscience and philosophy. ZKWell, project housing is always named after some titan of industry, or a scion of some sort, or lousy presidents. And Coolidge was one of the worst. I was talking about this with a friend recently. It’s like people from Staten Island turn into conflagrations because you hate everything about the place because even though Manhattan feels within arm’s reach, you are removed from it. You see the city progressing, you see it advancing, you see all of this capital and culture pouring into it, whereas Staten Island didn’t have that. When I was coming up, our only cultural export was the Wu-Tang Clan.BROTHER ALIVE is a novel about a family bound together by history and choice instead of genetics. I had heard of this novel and was intrigued. When I borrowed it from the library I couldn’t put it down. The novel is divided into three sections. Gorham, Luke (2022-07-01). "Brother Alive". Library Journal. Archived from the original on 2022-11-27 . Retrieved 2023-11-01. Pete Tosiello, writing for The New York Times Book Review, called the novel "beguiling", noting that the "epistolary structure lend[s] a confessional tone". He further praised the writing style, noting, "Khalid is such a gifted commentator that his methods bear close examination [...] Brother Alive is neither a press bulletin nor a position paper. Khalid’s sentences abound with florid, poetic metaphors while maintaining the clipped, declarative tempo of Scripture." [16] Howell, Jonah (2022-07-08). "Haldane's Demand: On Zain Khalid's "Brother Alive" ". Cleveland Review of Books. Archived from the original on 2023-09-26 . Retrieved 2023-11-01.

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are an inseparable if conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother.

About the Author

MBIs this or some of the other themes that went into the book ones you are still interested in exploring? When I reached the second section, which is narrated by Imam Salim, I welcomed his voice. I'd seen the questions the boys he's raising had regarding both him and their birth parents, and this section provided responses to those questions and many more. I didn't feel the fondness for him that I felt for the boys, but I don't think the author wanted me to. Imam Salim is a conflicted character who inspires conflicting feelings. Valdez, Jonah (2023-02-01). "Here are the finalists for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Awards". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2023-09-25. Library Journal's Luke Gorham said the book is " One the most exciting debuts in recent years.” and that it is "blisteringly intelligent, bursting with profound feeling, and host to some of the most complex, necessary characters in recent memory." He referred to the novel as "genre-defying", noting that "Khalid’s vision can be bleak, even cynical, but it’s also remarkably cogent and underscored with a profound tenderness". [17] Colson Whitehead once wrote that all it took to belong in New York City was an act of remembrance—the summoning of a piece of the city that no longer existed. “You are a New Yorker the first time you say, ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge,’” he wrote. “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” Whitehead wrote this essay in 2001 and it’s easy to understand why he was reflecting on what was missing: Two towers had left the skyline, and 2,977 people were gone with them.