In Light of Nature
—Texas Highways Magazine
An Open Palm
—Texas Highways Magazine
Hope, That Small Flame in a Dark Room in Afghanistan
—World Literature Today
From Small Pieces: Fowzia Karimi & Micheline Aharonian Marcom
—Denver Quarterly
Inter-Review: On the Objects of Memory and Where Text Meets Image on the Page, An Inter-Review between A. Kendra Greene and Fowzia Karimi
—Fourth Genre
Illuminated Manuscripts: An Interview with Fowzia Karimi by Merritt Tierce
—Southwest Review
In conversation with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm
—Bookworm
“Fowzia Karimi on the Draw of Illustrated Narratives”
—Literary Hub
“Essential Identities: An Interview with Fowzia Karimi”
—The Collidescope
“Five Books By Dallas Authors You Should Read Right Now”
—D Magazine
“Art and the City: Dallas writers are embracing their newfound solitude”
—The Dallas Morning News
”Fowzia Karimi: Above Us the Milky Way”
—The Modern Novel
Excerpts from Small Pieces by Micheline Aharonian Marcom, art by Fowzia Karimi
—Portland Review
Structure in Above Us the Milky Way
—Desi Books Podcast
“Structured as an illuminated alphabet, Karimi's startling debut pieces together a pastiche of memory, folklore, and multilayered sense impressions with photographs from Karimi's childhood and illustrations of her own making. The result is a sharply etched treatise on the objects of memory—encouraging a perhaps unavoidable comparison to Proust—which sets itself the monumental task of exploring the atrocity of war both as the bombs strike and as they reverberate down through the generations. Because, as Karimi concludes, a "war in one place is like a wound in all," and what else but the letters of an alphabet, or perhaps sisters, could, "give positive form to the formless" by being "forever in two places at once: bound to their fixed positions—for who could reorder the sequence of an alphabet?—and leaving their posts to form this…word." A novel powerful in both its beauty and its uncompromising horror whose themes are as sadly timely as they are eternal.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Karimi’s inventive, allegorical debut renders a family’s wartime emigration through a polyphonic mix of voices and genres along with evocative color illustrations and photographs…Karimi’s steady pace and loosely defined setting will allow readers to share in the characters’ dreams and visions of their “first land.” Fans of Lost Children Archive will love this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A skilled technician whose prose flows like intuition, Karimi parses the beats of her paragraphs with the attention of a poet. Rich with images and imagery, the book is beautiful, both illuminated and illuminating.”
—Foreward Reviews, Starred Review
“The writing is seductive, compelling, horrifying, irresistible. The story is dreamlike in its framework and structure, with adult Karimi and the reader dragged back into a spectral but all-too-real childhood, and that is key: the dead are never really gone if they live on in the childhood memories she—and we—can never relinquish.”
—Lone Star Literary, Chris Manno