The Mulai

‘A beguiling tale of Otherness that is not only a translation from another language but another planet, a story told so well that every familiar word feels as new as an alien horizon.’
— Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity

‘Munir Hachemi has created an interplanetary cargo cult and I’m ready to sign up. This exuberant voyage through space and time destabilizes our understanding of human (and not-so-human) civilization and religion through endlessly inventive riffs on language, translation and intertextuality. Julia Sanches’ playful, acrobatic rendering is the perfect accompaniment to this wild ride.’
— Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency

‘The Mulai is a fascinating exploration of the many languages, fears and desires that give rise to a culture – and to the very experience of what we call literature. Munir Hachemi writes with a fresh, original voice that calls to mind Saer, Borges, Calvino, and the finest speculative fiction.’
— Simón López Trujillo, author of Pedro the Vast

‘[An] impetuous, upstart spirit infuses this short and spunky tale about young, would-be literary men who hit the road in search of adventure but find bleakness and exploitation.... Hachemi’s is the sort of writing that compulsively interrogates itself as writing, in which literary theorizing runs alongside the storytelling.... Hachemi’s documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labour compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go.’
— Rob Doyle, New York Times (praise for Living Things)

‘Living Things turns out to be both highbrow and hair-raising (and exceptionally well translated by Julia Sanches). In only 120 pages it succeeds in several separate ways: as an eco-thriller exposing the horrors of industrialized meat production and agrochemicals; as a treatise on rendering truth in fiction; and, not least, as a “lads on tour” caper.’
— Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement (praise for Living Things)

‘Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It’s a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description.’
— James Greer, author of Bad Eminence (praise for Living Things)

‘Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I’ve read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world.’
— Dizz Tate, author of Brutes (praise for Living Things)

‘Heady, diaristic and compulsively readable in Julia Sanches’s perfect translation, four reckless and stubborn college students get themselves caught in the hell of factory farming in Southern France. To say that Living Things is a superb eco-thriller is both true and yet falls short of just how magnificently unclassifiable Hachemi’s novel is.’
— Jacob Rogers, The Center for Fiction (praise for Living Things)