Dave Eggers returns with another true-tale thriller
A new release also comes from Bay Area author Anne Raeff
Amid much discussion about what defines the American Dream and the dreamers who dream it, Best-selling Bay Area author Dave Eggers returns with a nonfiction profile of a young American who overcame extraordinary odds to achieve his dream of becoming a coffee importer. Additional new releases by Bay Area authors — all on themes of freedom and democracy — include a new essay collection, novels by Anne Raeff and Jasmin Darznik and a “memoir of wanderlust” by Laura Smith.
Eggers (“Heroes of the Frontier,” “The Circle,” “What Is the What”) returns with a fascinating nonfiction account blending coffee and history, war and entrepreneurship.
“The Monk of Mokha” (Knopf, $27.95, 368 pages) is the story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who grew up in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The son of Yemeni immigrants, Alkhanshali — a U.S. citizen and a Muslim — knew what it meant to be poor. But he was a quick learner with a winning personality. After working in sales jobs at Banana Republic and Honda, he spent time as a doorman in a San Francisco luxury highrise; by his mid-20s, though, he started seeing friends and relatives speed past him to college degrees and careers. Then, through a chance encounter, he started to learn about coffee and was shocked to find that Yemen, although it was the seat of the coffee world, hadn’t imported coffee to the United States in more than 80 years.
The book follows him as he travels to Yemen to learn the secrets of cultivation, roasting and importing; a journey that lands him in the heart of the country’s 2015 civil war. He survived embassy closures, suicide bombings and a perilous escape by sea. Eggers, tracking his story, delivers a tale that reads like a Hollywood thriller; except it’s true.
Alkhanshali eventually made it home and launched his award-winning coffee company, Port of Mokha, in Oakland, just across the bay from his childhood home.
Bay Area authors Joyce Maynard, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker and others contributed to “It Occurs to Me that I Am America: New Stories and Art” (Touchstone, $30, 400 pages) is published in support of the American Civil Liberties Union on the oneyear anniversary of the presidential inauguration and the Women’s March on Washington.
The writing, edited by Jonathan Santlofer, is timely and provocative with short stories, essays and black-and-white art. The contributors each consider the meaning of a free, just and compassionate democracy. Additional contributors include Roz Chast, Michael Cunningham, Louise Erdrich, Walter Mosley, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Art Spiegelman and Justin Torres.
Raeff’s new novel, “Winter Kept Us Warm,” (Counterpoint, $26, 304 pages) begins in contemporary Morocco where Ulli runs a small hotel. But much of the story is told in flashbacks: Ulli’s first love affair in 1937 Germany, to the friendship of Leo and Isaac, who meet as young American soldiers and to postwar Berlin in 1945, where Leo and Ulli become lovers, with Isaac the third in a triangle of shifting emotions and loyalties.
Spanning six decades, from Berlin to post-war Manhattan and 1960s Los Angeles, Raeff creates a moving sense of the sweep of history.