Dinner with Osama

<p>Advance Praise for <i>Dinner with Osama</i></p><p>Marilyn Krysl is one of our most gifted quirky and delightful storytellers--unpredictable funny and wildly inventive in wondrous ways. Her new collection shows her at the top of her form as she details the ordinary the absurd and the apocalyptic in outrageous and deeply affecting ways. --Jay Neugeboren author of <i>1940</i> and <i>News from the New American Diaspora</i></p><p>Marilyn Krysl's astonishing <i>Dinner with Osama</i> somehow finds the intersection between deep anguish at the state of the world and brilliant caustic and hilarious sociopolitical satire of America post-9/11. Its effrontery is peculiarly female its fierce intelligence that of a mother--or even ('Are We Dwelling Deep Yet?') a Great Mother--who needs to save and feed the world however she can. Its north and south must be 'Mitosis ' Krysl's heartbreaking life history of a young Dinka woman whose way of life and source of food have been destroyed by civil war in Sudan; its east and west is surely the title story in the voice of a politically irreproachable matriarch of Boulder Colorado who does her part by extending a dinner invitation to Osama--yes that Osama--through her 'pal' Abdullah at the local gyros stand; and Osama not only receives it he accepts. Israelis and Palestinians 'conflict'-addicted cliché-mongers of the creative writing workshop violent extremists of every stripe and above all the wealthy consumerist left are all skewered in this miraculous collection. --Jaimy Gordon author of <i>Bogeywoman</i> and <i>She Drove Without Stopping</i></p><p>We may have to invent a new term--'the political lyric ' perhaps--to describe the 'airy speech and inspired story' in Marilyn Krysl's brilliant new collection of short fiction <i>Dinner with Osama</i>. What holds all the fiction together as much as the impassioned political and cultural concerns that inform them is the writing which is lyrical in the best sense lyrical as in musical expressive and vivid. --Ed Falco author of <i>Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories</i></p>