All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti

Aarthi Vadde at Public Books:

Jamil Jan Kochai

Aarthi Vadde: Hello, and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast sponsored by the Society for Novel Studies and produced in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. I’m one of your hosts, Aarthi Vadde of Duke University. Today, we have novelist Jamil Jan Kochai and critic Kalyan Nadiminti joining us. Jamil’s most recent collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, in some ways picks up where his first novel, 99 Nights in Logar, left off, with stories that crossed the border between the United States and Afghanistan. These stories are alternatively funny, terrifying, and heartbreaking, and seem to fracture collective memory by delving into the minds of Afghanis across generations. The Haunting was the finalist for the National Book Award and named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022. Welcome, Jamil. So glad to have you here.

Jamil Jan Kochai: Hey, I’m happy to be here.

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