Yasmin Zaher’s “The Coin”

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Kate Wolf speaks with writer and journalist Yasmin Zaher about her debut novel, The Coin. An allegorical tale of alienation, loneliness, and repulsion, the book follows a Palestinian woman who’s recently fulfilled her family’s dream of moving to America. In New York, working as a middle school teacher, she finds herself disillusioned with the filth of the city and its poverty. She’s beset with a deep unease at her own body and haunted by memories, especially that of a coin—a shekel—she swallowed on a car ride as a child just moments before a horrible accident. Estranged from the few people she knows in the city, her behavior becomes increasingly unhinged and bizarre in ways that complicate standard stories of immigration and instead imagine the path of a character who sees through America’s promise and realizes she has nothing to lose.

Also, Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking, returns to recommend three books and one magazine: The Plague Edition of Konch Magazine, edited by Ishmael Reed and Tennessee Reed; Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings, edited by Michael Kelly and Monique Roelofs; James: A Novel by Percival Everett; and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith.