These stories recall the rhythms of poetry, offer up the intimacy of memoir, and often feel more like films than fiction. The Monotonous Chaos of Existence got me thinking about similarly semi-surreal and ecstatic truth tellers Denis Johnson and Chester Himes, a comparison that will have to do for now because I'm still dizzy and not exactly thinking straight after reading these interrogations of the cruelty and absurdity of occupation and so-called post-colonialism. Clear-eyed personal/political storytelling that is exciting, askew, and challenging.

—Brandon Soderberg, coauthor, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad

“I’m tired of turning the dials of History,” declares the narrator of one of these elegant, genre-crossing reveries, as if time were a type of mechanical function. On the contrary, The Monotonous Chaos of Existence proposes that time is a web of competing histories, fragmented memories, alternative realities, and dystopian dreams. A virtuoso of literary entanglements, Hisham Bustani is the spider at the center of this impassioned display of literary weaving.

—Campbell McGrath, author of XX: Poems For The Twentieth Century

The stories within Hisham Bustani’s The Monotonous Chaos of Existence explore the turbulent transformation in contemporary Arab societies. With a deft and poetic touch, Bustani examines the interpersonal with a global lens, connects the seemingly contradictory, and delves into the ways that international conflict can tear open the individuals that populate his world—all while pushing the narrative form into new and unexpected terrain.

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Publication Date: 1/18/2022

ISBN: 978-1-951853-08-2

Binding: Paperback

Pages: 178

Weight: 9 oz.