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PRAISE FOR Dina Nayeri AND The Ungrateful Refugee
“Nayeri, the author of two novels including Refuge, uses her first work of nonfiction to remind readers of the pain and horrors refugees face before and long after their settlement. It is timely, as President Trump has made barring refugees from the United States a priority, and the Western world is plagued with a surge in nativism. Nayeri combines her own experience with those of refugees she meets as an adult, telling their stories with tenderness and reverence.”
—NAZILA FATHI, The New York Times Book Review
“Nayeri is a reminder that people, actual human beings, are constantly faced with their entire existences being reduced to political anecdotes. The Ungrateful Refugee also reminds us that we should stop treating immigrants, or any group of people, as though their humanity is something they must earn.”
—KATHERINE TAMOLA, Shondaland, 1 of 9 Reads You Won’t Be Able to Put Down
“Nayeri describes fleeing Iran as a child and living in an Italian hotel before being granted asylum in America . . . An incredibly timely book.’
—EMILY TEMPLE, Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
“Crystalline, vivid, moving, and without pretensions, Nayeri’s writing is fluid and spare.”
—AZARIN SADEGH, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Topical and urgent.”
—MAURA M. LYNCH and JINNIE LEE, W magazine
“Lovely.”
—Vanity Fair
“An account of not only [Nayeri’s] own story, going from the privileged daughter of educated professionals to a refugee living in an Italian camp to a fiction writer in Iowa City, but of other desperate asylum-seekers who are expected to perform gratefulness for every act of basic human decency. Why must refugees be good? What does ‘good’ or ‘deserving’ mean, anyway?”
—TOMI OBARO, BuzzFeed, 1 of 33 Most Exciting Books Coming Out This Fall
“There has never been a better time to read The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri writes of her own experiences as a refugee and of the ex-periences of a number of others to craft a nuanced portrait of immigration that steps beyond the rhetoric of ‘invasion’ and challenges the notion of the ‘good’ immigrant.”
—CRISTINA ARREOLA, Bustle
“Nayeri’s book is compelling and powerfully told, a must-read for anyone who needs an insight into the common threads we all share, and a reminder of how important it is to keep them unbroken.”
—KRISTIN IVERSEN, NYLON, 1 of the 34 Books You’ll Want to Read This Fall
“Nayeri’s masterful storytelling in The Ungrateful Refugee cuts into the marrow of a profoundly human experience. She brings read-ers past the boundary of personal space and safe distance into uncomfortably close proximity. Through personal stories, including her own, Nayeri invites us to sit in the despair, anxiety, restlessness, and—contemptuously enough, the pride—of people whose lives are separated from ours not by worth or merit but simply by circumstance.”
—FRANCES NGUYEN, Electric Literature
“A curated, collective memory piece that throws into question what it means to be a refugee and how it alters the contours of someone’s life . . . [A] fuller perspective on the struggles confronted by the 70.8 million people wrapped up in a statistic.”
—JOCELYN FRELIER, Los Angeles Review of Books
“[A] nuanced look at what it feels like to be a fully realized person reduced to the single word, ‘refugee.’”
—SARATH MURDOCH, The Star (Toronto)
“A compelling book that should be required reading in 2019.”
—FRANNIE JACKSON, Paste, One of the Best Books of the Month
“A fascinating book for readers interested in learning more about the experiences of refugees worldwide, and Nayeri expertly works in contextual information about refugees in the world today as she tells her own story.”
—Bookish, One of the Season’s Best New Nonfiction
“Born in Iran during the revolution, Dina Nayeri understands the fear, uncertainty, and confusion of leaving the only place you’ve known for new and unrecognizable countries. Nayeri shares her own stories and those of others to help the reader examine immigration, migration, and the refugee crisis from a variety of often unheard perspectives.”
—KARLA STRAND, Ms.
“Nayeri offers a searing, nuanced and complex account of her life as a refugee and of the experiences of other more recent refugees from Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. The stories are terrifying, disheartening, sometimes uplifting and definitely worth reading and meditating on...Nayeri is neither a journalist nor a polemicist. She’s a storyteller who invites our moral engagement.”
—ALDEN MUDGE, BookPage
“Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee takes us through her child and adolescent’s view of her family’s experience fleeing from Iran in the ’70s, interweaving that story with reporting she did as an adult about the dreams and terrors of other refugees she encountered, as they went up against irrational and sometimes deadly bureaucratic systems in their efforts to get to safety. All of this is written in crisp, lucid prose laced with great compassion and often fury.”
—CELESTE FREMON, WitnessLA
“A gallery of powerful portraits of the experiences of those fleeing persecution and war, and those who help and support them. This is not comfortable reading, but it is compelling. In moving, poetic prose Nayeri unravels this dificult subject, never dodging trou-bling questions.”
—LYNNDA WARDLE, Glasgow Review of Books
“Depending on your values, or which newspapers you read, refugees are all helpless victims or unwelcome hordes. And the tendency to speak in statistics is a failing of even the most sym-pathetic Europeans. That’s where Dina Nayeri comes in. Her book, The Ungrateful Refugee, is a memoir-cum-dispatch from the front lines of displacement. She works hard to put names, faces, quirks and favourite recipes to the anonymous numbers we read about—or switch off from . . . Nayeri has found her place. In the lives and living quarters of refugees, using their ‘orphan details’ to humanise a crisis so often portrayed as a footnote in geopolitical upheaval.”
—ANOOSH CHAKELIAN, New Statesman
“Evocative . . . Nayeri deftly explores the balance between truth and storytelling when it comes to the expectations of both the telling and the hearing of these accounts. She helps us see beyond a person’s citizenship status to recognize their humanity, most affectingly questioning whether it’s necessary to remove a person’s dignity in order to help them. A much-needed exploration of the refugee experience; Nayeri’s writing will be welcomed by a wide audience.”
—Library Journal
“Blistering in its unequivocal critiques of the legal systems that keep refugees in limbo, yet strikingly layered and nuanced in its storytelling, The Ungrateful Refugee is timely, unsettling, compassionate and deeply compelling.”
—KATIE NOAH GIBSON, Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“This book’s combination of personal narrative and collective refugee story is compelling, necessary, and deeply thought and felt. Writing with truth and beauty, Nayeri reckons with her own past as a refugee . . . This valuable account of refugee lives will grip readers’ attention.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“With inventive, powerful prose, Nayeri demonstrates what should be obvious: that refugees give up everything in their native lands only when absolutely necessary—if they remain, they may face poverty, physical torture, or even death . . . A unique, deeply thought-out refugee saga perfect for