Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Call Me Zebra (2019) and Savage Tongues (2021). She has won numerous awards for her writing, including a 2019 Pen/Faulkner Award, a 2019 John Gardner Award, a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Fiction, and was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree. She has lived in Italy, Spain, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.
“Oloomi enters so fully and sympathetically into the mad logic of
her narrator that scenic detail, chronology, cause and effect, and
even such mundane props as cactus, mailman, and ringing phone are
bent, doubled, or subsumed by the paranoid geometries of meaning he
draws. . . . Subtly menacing, but not without humor, the novel
derives momentum and tension from the space between its clear,
intelligent language and the absolute unreliability of its
narrator.” —Slate
“A rare gem of a book that begs to be read again.” —Publishers
Weekly
“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi writes sentences that are crisp and
formal, but the madness they depict is anything but. Her ambition,
to take you inside a completely unreliable narrator, still manages
to create a rare and strong narrative drive. Controlled yet
bizarre, it pulls you in.” —Whiting Award judges
“The risks this novel takes are numerous, and so are the rewards.”
—Dinaw Mengetsu
“Obsessive/delightful, Fra Keeler subtly elaborates on life’s
details, its ordinary lunacies. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s
observations are droll and often hilarious. Her novel’s incidents
pile up and on, tilting and shifting under the weight of language’s
bizarre disturbances. Fra Keeler is wonderfully imaginative, the
work of a terrific young writer.” —Lynne Tillman
“You ask: What sort of fiction are we reading here? Anticipating
just this question, on her ‘Acknowledgments’ page, Oloomi provides
a checklist of books and films that she says made this work
‘possible’: works by César Aira, Thomas Bernhard, Luis Buñuel,
Nikolai Gogol, Alfred Hitchcock, and Clarice Lispector, to name
only a handful from her inventory of what one could call the
‘literature of madness,’ if ‘madness’ were not so reductive a term
for the complexities to which Fra Keeler pays tribute.” —American
Book Review
“Ultimately, Fra Keeler’s preoccupation with thought and a mind’s
unraveling reminds us that we’re each ensconced within our own
mind, we’re stationed behind the window of our own perceptions,
perhaps never truly knowing anything beyond ourselves. There’s
something magical and mad in this.” —Music and Literature
“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the descendent of writers as
brilliant and disparate as Max Frisch, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Per
Petterson. Fra Keeler is a compelling and humorously associative
meditation on how ‘one lives against one’s dying,’ and how that
living will be in contra-distinction to all that explains that
death on paper after its fact. Would that more book groups read
books of this complexity and intelligence; discussion would reach
on into the wee hours!” —Michelle Latiolais
“In Fra Keeler a mind churns on itself, while reality—if it is
reality—comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a
bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the
uncertain perception of the narrator. This is a book by turns funny
and strange, but always entertaining.” —Brian Evenson
“Obsessive. Surreal. Darkly comic. Chilling.” —Robert Coover
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