Book Launch – “Him, Me, Muhammad Ali” by Randa Jarrar

The event will feature a reading by Randa Jarrar and will be hosted by CBC journalist Pacinthe Mattar.

Randa Jarrar’s stories grapple with love, loss, displacement, and survival in a collection that moves seamlessly between real- ism and fable, history and the present. With humor, irony, and boundless imagination, Jarrar brings to life a memorable cast of characters, many of them “accidental transients”—a term for migratory birds who have gone astray—seeking their circuitous routes back home.

“Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a searing collection of short stories about loving, lusting, losing, and surviving. Randa Jarrar is one of the finest writers of her generation. Her voice is assured, fiercely independent, laced with humor and irony—and always, always, honest.”
—Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account and The Secret Son

“Jarrar combines the invention of Calvino, the sprung style of Paley, the poetic imagery of Babel . . . like a female, Arab American Junot Díaz! But that mash-up isn’t mere stylistic exuberance; it’s a restless, relentless and deeply affecting effort to forge identity out of frag- ments, to make a whole out of halves. These are the stories we need right now.”
—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl and The Ugliest House in the World

Randa Jarrar is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Her novel A Map of Home was published in six languages, won an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by The Barnes & Noble Review.

Our entrance is wheelchair accessible but not our bathroom

Co-sponsored by the The Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Pomegranate Tree Group, Outburst!, and the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto