Please join PRINT: A Bookstore and the MWPA as we host a virtual conversation between Farah Ali and Phuc Tran.
People Want to Live, Farah Ali’s debut collection, features stories of togetherness and reckless faith in the face of a world that’s built to break us.
Set in Pakistan, these award-winning stories follow people living on the brink of abandonment—in their personal relationships and their place in the world.
A mother, coping with the sudden death of her son, uncovers long buried secrets in his absence.
An anguished girl grabs a chance for a life beyond the orphanage walls where she lives and discovers the price of freedom.
A young couple tries to keep their fraught relationship intact as a heat wave engulfs their city.
Ali’s characters battle loneliness and, in their fight, reveal surprising vulnerabilities and an astonishing measure of hope.
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Farah Ali is from Pakistan. Her work has been anthologized in the 2020 Pushcart Prize as well as received special mention in the 2018 Pushcart anthology. Her stories have appeared in Shenandoah, The Arkansas International, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review online, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere. People Want to Live is her first collection.
Phuc Tran has been a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour. His acclaimed memoir, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction. He lives with his family in Portland.