I'm Not Muhammad - Softcover

Jason Trask

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0975951521 ISBN 13: 9780975951521

Publisher: Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2011

Synopsis

I'M NOT MUHAMMAD chronicles the paranoia that many American felt during the dark and momentous days following 9/11. In that atmosphere of high alert, Yusuf Alsawari, a graduate student married to an American woman, is swept up by mysterious government agents. His civil rights suspended and unable to contact his family, he quickly finds himself living a nightmare. In Trask's telling, Alsawari's story is by turns harrowing, horrific, comic, and always moving. I'm Not Muhammad is a powerful first novel that is, on the one hand, a deeply felt personal narrative about the tragic consequences for the victims of extraordinary rendition; on the other, a disturbing cautionary tale about America in the 21st Century.

About this title

About the Author:

Jason Trask lives in Western Maine in the foothills of the White Mountains. He teaches in an alternative education program, working with kids who have been traumatized by seeing through the system. He is married and has three sons. I'm Not Muhammad is his first novel.

Review:

"Jason Trask has written an unusually brave, intelligent, insightful and totally unexpected first novel. A bravura act of committed imagination, it transmutes the unimaginable into hard reality." --Francisco Goldman, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Archbishop and The Divine Husband
"Yusuf is a typical young American guy. Okay, so there's no typical American. Details vary. But if you squint to blur out the particulars such as all of Yusuf's stubbornnesses in his marriage to Ruth...wait a minute. That's typical, isn't it? Okay, so he's typical and we are going to be at his side as he is jerked into the devil's realm by...uh...shall we say other typical American guys? Rose-tinted glasses don't function here. This new all-American novel is in shades of hell.... It's a very, very important book. I hope it goes far and wide." --Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt Maine, Letourneau's Used Auto Parts, Snow Man, Merry Men, and The School on Heart's Content Road

"Jason Trask's disarming novel I'm Not Muhammad is a brave hard look at dubious times. In crisp, clean prose, the author conjures up a seemingly ordinary world of marital discord before the canonical date of 9/11, only to suddenly pull the rug out from under the reader, compelling him to slide along with the bewildered protagonist into the whirlpool of extraordinary rendition. It's Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka's The Trial, spiked with healthy helpings of the Marquis de Sade. The Beach Boys just went waterboarding. And they didn't have a good time." --Peter Wortsman, author of A Modern Way to Die; translator of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil and Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist

This strong, well-developed first novel charts the plight of an Arab-American conflicted about his identity well before the government harassment of the post-9/11 world. --Publishers Weekly

"Jason Trask's disarming novel I'm Not Muhammad is a brave hard look at dubious times. In crisp, clean prose, the author conjures up a seemingly ordinary world of marital discord before the canonical date of 9/11, only to suddenly pull the rug out from under the reader, compelling him to slide along with the bewildered protagonist into the whirlpool of extraordinary rendition. It's Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka's The Trial, spiked with healthy helpings of the Marquis de Sade. The Beach Boys just went waterboarding. And they didn't have a good time." --Peter Wortsman, author of A Modern Way to Die; translator of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil and Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Wheelbarrow Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0975951521
• ISBN 13: 9780975951521
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 253