Description
Fiction. Middle Eastern Studies. Youssef Alaoui's short-story collection, FIERCER MONSTERS, is concerned with the symbology of letters and the word as invocation, contrasted with the futility of language. In these stories, Alaoui presents a Neanderthal oracle, a little girl in Venezuela in the 1950s, a 19th-century hallucinating sailor, and a WWI soldier. The voices are sometimes salty, always salient. Each voice ultimately laments the fall of the tower of Babel and the resulting confusion.
Author Bio
Youssef Alaoui has spent most of his professional life in library stacks and at the computer referencing worn out facts and citations, researching antiquated wisdom or cutting edge sciences. For a few years, he served as a contracted international investigator. His home cities are Morro Bay, Tempe, Paris, Lille, Seattle, and Oakland. Youssef is a Moroccan American Latino. His family and heritage are an endless source of inspiration for his varied, dark, spiritual and carnal writings. He earned an MFA in Poetics from New College of California, Mission District, San Francisco. There, he studied classical Arabic poetry, Spanish baroque poetry and Moroccan contemporary poetry. He is also well versed in 19th Century literature of the fantastic. His writings have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Big Bridge, Cherry Bleeds, 580 Split, Full of Crow, Carcinogenic Poetry, Dusie Press, Tsunami Books, Red Fez, and Rivet Journal.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA