The Prom Terrorists by Rabih Alameddine, 2022
The magic trick:
Building an Arrested Development episode
Hilarious story today, dark and twisted as it is.
The author takes America’s racist, paranoid anti-Islam ignorance and turns it into a Thurber-esque comedy, a rollicking episode of a Muslim Arrested Development.
And that’s quite a trick on Alameddine’s part.
The selection:
No matter what my baby sister says, I don’t want you to think I’m stupid, but no one seems to think that maybe the FBI is stupid or that maybe it wasn’t my fault but my parents’, since they suddenly decided that I needed to find a job and move out because only losers still lived with their parents at 28, and that was when I said that they meant slacker and not loser, but they didn’t know what slacker meant since English is their second language, and I said that if we were back in the old country, which is something they always said, I would be living at home until I got married, at which point they’d have to buy a house for my wife and me, but we were in the hellhole known as Fresno, which was better than the shithole where they were born but not by much, if you ask me, …
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