num_pages: 52
description: A grieving mother clutching a dead bird a jealous lover watching his house burn to the ground a vision of God in a chicken coop. Through twelve short stories that span the private loneliness of Pakistani bedrooms to the banality of the modern American kitchen Lovebirds shows love cracking and shattering and exploding. Capturing families on the precipice of unraveling as they reckon with the unspeakable realities of any given Wednesday Hananah Zaheer surveys the complex fringes of desire asking What are we willing to lose for one another? Let this book set you on fire. Then revisit and rebuild. It will feel good like practice.Advanced Praise:The stories in Hananah Zaheers Lovebirds are full of hard edges and delicate centers with a compressed form that brilliantly echoes the physical mental and spiritual cages that trap its characters. From Pakistan to America to an apocalyptic coal-choked Anywhere these stories show the cost of being unstuck depicting with great compassion womens complicated relationships with violence. Written with unflinching detail and tension Lovebirds was a book I had to set down at times in order to catch my breath only to pick it right back up because I already missed reading it.Simon Han author of Nights When Nothing HappenedWhen I think of the term lovebirds it invokes a sickly-sweet kind of sentimentalitybut the stories in this collection are anything but that. There is a wise darkness in Hananah Zaheers writing a sweeping away of innocence a slow wake to violence or regret. Reading these stories you feel like Zaheer can masterfully flit into the minds of all of uslovers dreamers mothers husbands survivors killersand expose the frantically beating heart in our underbelly.Tara Laskowski author of One Night Gone
language: English
title: Lovebirds
publisher: Bull City Press