INTERACTIVE
Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected
Jamil Jan Kochai reads and discusses "A Premonition; Recollected," a short story published by SAAG that reads like a single, long-drawn breath. The story subsequently appeared in Kochai's acclaimed collection "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories."
Jamil Jan Kochai
In November 2020, SAAG Chats kicked off with an Instagram Live reading and discussion of "A Premonition; Recollected" between its author, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. The story was originally published in SAAG Volume 1.
Subsequently, the story appeared in Jamil Jan Kochai's acclaimed collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, and winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize.
Here, Jamil Jan Kochai and Hananah Zaheer discuss the balance between brevity and density in the story, and its inspiration both from the nature of memory and the War on Terror in Afghanistan.
In November 2020, SAAG Chats kicked off with an Instagram Live reading and discussion of "A Premonition; Recollected" between its author, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. The story was originally published in SAAG Volume 1.
Subsequently, the story appeared in Jamil Jan Kochai's acclaimed collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, and winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize.
Here, Jamil Jan Kochai and Hananah Zaheer discuss the balance between brevity and density in the story, and its inspiration both from the nature of memory and the War on Terror in Afghanistan.
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Live
Afghanistan
Short Story
SAAG Chats
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak
Language
Disaster & Language
Disaster & Faith
Flash Fiction
Fiction
National Book Award
Peshawar
Logar
War on Terror
Memory
Discourses of War
Allegiance
Pashto
Farsi
Narrators
War Crimes
Militarism
Short Stories
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 short story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022) was shortlisted for the National Book Award. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.