Lovebirds by Hananah Zaheer

Description

A grieving mother clutching a dead bird, a jealous lover watching his house burn to the ground, a vision of God in a chicken coop. Through twelve short stories that span the private loneliness of Pakistani bedrooms to the banality of the modern American kitchen, Lovebirds shows love cracking and shattering and exploding. Capturing families on the precipice of unraveling as they reckon with the unspeakable realities of any given Wednesday, Hananah Zaheer surveys the complex fringes of desire, asking What are we willing to lose for one another? Let this book set you on fire. Then revisit and rebuild. It will feel good, like practice.

“The stories in Hananah Zaheer’s Lovebirds are full of hard edges and delicate centers, with a compressed form that brilliantly echoes the physical, mental, and spiritual cages that trap its characters. From Pakistan, to America, to an apocalyptic, coal-choked Anywhere, these stories show the cost of being unstuck, depicting with great compassion women’s complicated relationships with violence. Written with unflinching detail and tension, Lovebirds was a book I had to set down at times in order to catch my breath, only to pick it right back up because I already missed reading it.”
—Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing Happened

“When I think of the term ‘lovebirds,’ it invokes a sickly-sweet kind of sentimentality—but the stories in this collection are anything but that. There is a wise darkness in Hananah Zaheer’s writing, a sweeping away of innocence, a slow wake to violence or regret. Reading these stories, you feel like Zaheer can masterfully flit into the minds of all of us—lovers, dreamers, mothers, husbands, survivors, killers—and expose the frantically beating heart in our underbelly.”
—Tara Laskowski, author of One Night Gone

Hananah Zaheer

Hananah Zaheer is a writer, editor, improvisor and photographer.

She is the author of a flash chapbook Lovebirds (Bull City Press, 2021). Other writing has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as The Cut, Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, Pleiades, Waxwing, AGNI, Pithead Chapel, Smokelong (Pushcart nomination), Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, South West Review, Alaska Quarterly Review (with a Notable Story mention in Best American Short Stories 2019) and Michigan Quarterly Review, where she won the Lawrence Foundation Prize for Fiction. She was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for 2019, was a finalist for the Smokelong Fellowship 2019, the Doris Betts’ Fiction prize 2014 and a recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Rivendell Writers’ Colony and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart prize.

She is a 2023-24 Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute fellow at the Center for Asian Pacific American Women, serves as a Fiction Editor for Los Angeles Review, and as senior editor for SAAG: a dissident literary anthology—a project that seeks to make space for radical and experimental South Asian art and writing. She is the founder of the Dubai Literary Salon, an international prose-reading series, and a guest editor for a Pakistan folio for Pleiades, out in Fall 2023. Currently, she is working on a novel.