A Goat Even if it Flies

• A Goat Even if it Flies
• Price: $22.00
• 978-1-949540-42-0
• February 10 2025
• Fiction - PB
• TBA
• Tariq al Haydar

Presale Available Now: A Goat Even if it Flies will ship on or around Decmeber 1, 2024. Book cover image forthcoming.

C&R Press Fiction 2022 Award Winner

ABOUT

The stories in this collection are wildly diverse. It opens with “Ascent Phase,” from the perspective of a child during the Gulf War, and ends with “The Legend of Boland: A Misleading Man,” which attempts to implode the concept of narrative. In between, stories tackle tribalism, exploitation, gender segregation, mysticism, bureaucracy, and the nation-state. The collection includes one poem and a narrative non-fiction piece about my failure to write about a slave narrative. What holds the collection together is simply how weird it is to live in Saudi Arabia in the 21st century, and how the United States is perpetually in the shadows.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A GOAT EVEN IF IT FLIES

“Rife with hallucinatory imagery and shot through with love, dread, and surrealism, Tariq al Haydar’s A GOAT EVEN IF IT FLIES introduces the reader to ministries and departments of where every watchword is a Catch-22; a baby so big his elbows look like grandfather clocks; and Mos Def referencing Emily Dickinson to argue that the word orange can actually be rhymed. With echoes of Salman Rushdie and Hassan Blasim, al Haydar takes readers on a wild ride through atypical scenes of war, episodes of mind-bending bureaucratic ludicrousness, magical realities infused with tenderness and brutality, and characters who somehow manage—at times hilariously—to thread the needle of the absurd. Or don’t.”
-Marian Palaia

“Tariq al Haydar has given us a gift: Fifteen wonders! By turns mythic, absurd, hilarious and profound, I felt my mind spinning, making new connections in my synapse at the end of each story. A GOAT EVEN IF IT FLIES is a book of wonder and delight!”
-Rion Amilcar Scott

“al Haydar’s stories seem to come from under Dostoevsky’s coat, they are fever dreams as much as they are stories. They come equipped with a wry, inventive voice that feels at odds with its broken world. These narratives are often satirical reports from a place that feels suspended between hypermodernity and feudal hierarchies. Here, peace is as weird as war. Rooted in the real and the carnal, this version of the real accommodates magic and myth. It is a place full of men looking for home, love, god—alienated by the countless absurdities of being alive.”
-Elvis Bego