From the Paris Review staff picks

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Jane Breakell chose TO REMAIN NAMELESS as her pick for May 2020:

 

It’s the language of crisis, tuned to the story it tells: After years of wandering the world and considering it home, after dedicating her life to a field centered on helping humans for humans’ sake while witnessing the world grow ever more violent, Tess in the maternity ward suspects that humans are the problem. “We should all drop dead,” she thinks, rubbing her pregnant friend’s back. “It would be the best thing that could happen.”

Her write-up is here.

On Writing To Remain Nameless

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from the Rescue Press site:

 

I wrote the first sketches that would find their way into this book over ten years ago while housesitting for a Mexican painter on the coast of Oaxaca. Fresh in my mind were the years I spent in the Balkans as an itinerant journalist and aid worker. Also more recent seasons in Damascus, Beirut, and Istanbul.

I experienced the aftermath of the Bosnian war, and worked through the refugee crisis of 1999. I was holed up in Serbia, among people in whose name much killing had been done, when the US invaded Iraq. That war was at its height when I first sat down in Mexico to write.

The rest is here

 

 

Events

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I participated in Bookstore.org’s inaugural online event: “What is the Role of the Writer in a Time of Crisis?” on July 16, 2020 — a reading and discussion with Ishmael Beah, whose novel Little Family also came out during the pandemic. Sadly, the app crashed during the talk, so it wasn’t recorded.

I participated in Les Bleus, a virtual literary salon organized by Paige McGreevy, a UN worker out of Nairobi on  Saturday, July 11th. The Les Bleus IG page is here: https://www.instagram.com/lesbleusliterarysalon/?hl=en

The Harvard Book Store organized a reading and discussion with my friend and former professor, the fabulous novelist Claire Messud on Friday, July 10th. Recording is here.

Christina Chiu and the New York Writers Workshop invited me and the investigative journalist Toby Muse to present our books on July 7, 2020, . We talked about the drug war, the war on terror, fiction vs nonfiction, and gin vs tonic. The recording is here:

I discussed my translation of the Song of the Banu Sasan with Arab Lit Quarterly editor Marcia Lynx Qualey, for the first episode of Arab Lit Q TV, also on July 7. The video is here.

McNally Jackson arranged a virtual launch on May 25, 2020 for To Remain Nameless. In conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum, whose book of essays, Figure It Out, came out at the same time. Footage is here:

Rescue Night at Berl’s: I read at Berl’s Poetry Bookshop with Tessa Micaela, Sara Deniz Akant, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, and Adrienne Raphel, on Feb. 27, 2020.

TO REMAIN NAMELESS is out from Rescue Press

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order here: www.rescuepress.co

Tess keeps vigil at the bedside of her friend Laura through a long night of labor as Laura’s first child arrives. The two have known each other for what seems like forever. Their humanitarian aid work has taken them from the Balkans, to Egypt, to Istanbul amid the ongoing refugee crisis—an era that includes the US’s war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and many forms of global consequence and aftermath. Brad Fox’s first novel is a luminous inquiry into the incarnations and limits of hope. This writer helps us endure our questions about what forms care may take, what we may offer to anyone, near and far.

PRAISE FOR TO REMAIN NAMELESS:

Brad Fox’s virtuoso novelistic voice, alternately terse and florid, in the mode of José Saramago, Roberto Bolaño, or Alberto Moravia, is sonorous, lapidary, and melancholy—a seamless dreamy fabulist omniscience, bearing world-weary witness to perilous events, both inner and outer. Fox gives the impression of having lived underground or in other centuries and of only now emerging from his hiding place to narrate these limpid yet dense fantasias. A phenomenally gifted novelist and a probing intellectual, he transforms critical thinking into dramatic scenario. “Thought” isn’t appended to the story, but emerges in the complicated telling of the tale. In a bravura feat of formal construction, To Remain Nameless flashes between a birth scene and international adventures: from the cramped, germinating vantage of a hospital room, the novelist unfurls a teeming network of international exaltations and disappointments. The room compresses; the world expands. Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf pioneered this trick of simultaneous engorgement and diminution, of funhouse-mirror space-time reversal; and now Brad Fox, wonder-worker, takes up the dizzying mantle.
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

Daring, vivid and utterly original, Brad Fox’s debut is a tour de force.
CLAIRE MESSUD

To Remain Nameless is a gorgeous meditation on a shifting self in a shifting world, a querying-onward in which there’s both melancholy and delight.
SHELLEY JACKSON

Very intense like a bright light.
FANNY HOWE

First, Swallow the World

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“First, Swallow the World: Muslim Dreams of Completion — the Maqamat, Ibn Arabi, and Faris al-Shidyaq”

My first peer-reviewed paper. On trickster tales, dream interpretation, Sufi visions, and mad satire. It’s out via World Art:

To read symbols within their varied contexts, a dream interpreter needed not only to master the traditions, but to interact with all manner of ideas and people and undergo varied experiences. And the interpreter could not be prudish or squeamish. The dream manuals, like dreams themselves, were riddled with illicit sex and violence. No lesser dream interpreter than the prophet Muhammad listened to the erotic dreams of his community, even addressing the meaning of particular nocturnal emissions. Only after one has become intimate with the switchbacks of fate, the vast multiplicity of life with its subtle intimations, exaltations, and trifling idiocies, was one suited to decode the symbols and stories carried back from the land of sleep.

Find it here:

https://tandfonline.com/…/full/10.1080/21500894.2020.1716058

If you’re interested, and need to get past the paywall, message me.

Heatwave

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December 11, 2019

Now on this first morning where the city is dusted with snow, I opened my newsletter file and found something I wrote in the heat of the summer and for some reason never sent out. So in view of the cold months to come, and happy to remember the romantic scene at the end, I’m sending it now:

JULY, THE RIVER

It’s like I’ve completely forgotten how to write. I spent all last winter reading a hundred books for my oral exams. I read Plato and Pessoa and Natalie Legere and Ismail Hakki Bursevi and eventually I sat in a little room with my three professors and tried to make sense of it all. And then I edited a book for months on end. A seemingly endless process. All the minute decisions one can make about an article or a comma or the transliteration of an Arabic word or maybe just change everything.

Then I sat in the basement of the Bronx Zoo going through heaps of documents and photos and illustrations related to the bathysphere dives. And then the heatwave came. It was so hot we could hardly move. The air was still. The silver waterproofing on the roof of the building next door wavered in the heat. The tar on the road was soft and sticky and even the river was hot.

A week ago I worked as a kayaker on a long distance swim around Manhattan. I accompanied Alessandra Cima, a Brazilian woman living in Singapore, who had already crossed the English Channel and the Bosphorus. I biked through Harlem at 5am to arrive at Ward’s Island, jumped in a kayak and paddled over to a place called Mill Rock, near where the East River and the Harlem connect. Hell’s Gate, near where a bunch of researchers looked for sunken treasure in the 1920s. Finding nothing.

the whole letter is here:

Para Abajo!

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Somewhere up there rocks jut and grasses hang. They look close but feel remote, the water’s surface an indifferent sky. Feet dangle from it, kicking. Hands thrash. A kid with a mask and snorkel dives down a couple of meters, his willowy body beats the water with explosive energy. Time is short—a single breath. While we hover far below, in an eternity limited by the air in our tanks. We are covered in moss and sink into the stone.

The full story: