"The Alexandria You Are Losing showcases a truly original voice and a brilliant imagination. Yasser El-Sayed captures with verve, surprise and insight what it is to be alive and human. Each story is a jewel, mounted by itself in a unique setting to capture its own light. But the common theme is an author who helps us connect to what is universal, to the mystery of being human and our ways of experiencing it. Ration your reading because this delicious repast ends too soon."
--Abraham Verghese, New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone
"With unflinching and poignant perception, El-Sayed captures the experience of living in a foreign place. Some who are displaced find adjustment difficult, family dynamics complicated and sometimes turbulent, are explored with subtlety and candor. The reader will not be left unsatisfied by the powerful stories in this collection. In a style reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, this is the right book at the right time."
--Julia Nunnally Duncan, author of A Place That Was Home, and A Part of Me
"The Alexandria You Are Losing is a searing addition to the growing body of literature in English focusing on place, displacement, and the complicated relationships between characters with dual Eastern and Western connections and identities. A renowned doctor, El-Sayed tells stories with surgical precision, giving voice to feelings of loss and longing."
--Allen Mendenhall, editor of Southern Literary Review
"The Alexandria You are Losing is a beautiful collection of moving stories, a report from exotic territory, full of vibrant detail and the atmosphere of memory, sometimes fraught, often moving, always fascinating. I read these stories with excitement and pleasure, not least because El-Sayed knows how to find the heart even when there's trouble just over the horizon."
--Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants, The Remedy for Love, and The Girl of the Lake.
"The Alexandria You are Losing is a gorgeous collection of stories alive with a common humanity that transcends their themes of cultural collision and drifting dislocation. Yasser El-Sayed's ability to channel voices from diverse geographies and backgrounds --from the decaying beauty of Alexandria, Egypt to the frigid grit of a Wisconsin winter-- is unique; he is shrewdly observant, but not judgmental, and blessed with a wicked sense of humor. The characters were so vivid and present I inhaled them, and I wanted to live in their stories."
--David Madsen, screenwriter of Copycat
"You will carry these stories in your heart, as I do. Yasser El-Sayed's calm presence brings to us characters making lives in the chasm between traditional North African cultures and unrooted American lives. The stories illuminate cultural struggles cleanly and humanely, with great subtlety and nuance. If you have enjoyed the complex and resonant craft of a Raymond Carver, you will delight in these polished and brilliant stories."
--Clay Lewis, author of Battlegrounds of Memory
"Beautifully poetic prose fill the pages of The Alexandria You Are Losing as lost souls search for home, for a place to belong... El-Sayed's characters drift without the anchor of home to moor them, yet their warmth and humanity as they stumble for footing draw you to them."
--Lara Bernhardt, author of Shadow of the Taj
