The acrobatics of his prose are paired with a slanted collage of genres and ideas: An immigrant novel that bridges Staten Island to Saudi Arabia a coming-of-age novel about three orphaned boys and their enigmatic Imam caretaker a novel partly about a shape-shifty doppelgänger that lives within and outside of the narrator, Youssef Smith a queer novel with the tropes of a thriller a systems novel as beguiling as an episode of Black Mirror (its predecessor The Twilight Zone is a favorite show of the brothers. The novel's pleasures owe much to Khalid's generosity as a novelist. The manuscript has since been refined into his acclaimed debut work, Brother Alive(Grove Press). I offered to be its first reader and was struck by Khalid's raw talent. I recounted my bygone days as a book editor, and he mentioned having just finished a manuscript. Stuck in an empty room for nearly an hour, we acquainted ourselves by sharing our relationships to literature. We were both helping another writer move apartments. I met the novelist Zain Khalid in an unexpected literary way.
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