Fiercer Monsters

"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. [[Youssef Alaoui’ s investigation sifts through language finding and discarding gods along the way. Not so much a trip down rabbit holes, but rather the invention of mirrors. Storytelling in which you find instruments where time should be. Or the monologue of a man who is shuffling cards near his own crime scene."
— Tongo Eisen-Martin, Someone’ s Dead Already ; Blood on the Fog]]

Youssef Alaoui is quietly experiencing the swirling cosmos as it taps against his window in a house not far from the sea. His family and heritage are an endless source of inspiration for his varied, dark, spiritual and carnal writings. He has an MFA in Poetics from New College of California, San Francisco. His work has appeared in several books & anthologies, a zillion zines, leí do en voz alta in Oakland, NYC, CDMX, Paris, Cairo, London, SF, LA, and nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. For more info, go to youssefalaoui.info