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“A remarkable collection…seamed with sharp wit, and often hilarious…Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories
My Story
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His second book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022), won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2024 Clark Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, VQR, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He is a graduate of California State University, Sacramento, University of California, Davis, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is currently at work on his second novel