Employing elements of the surreal, the absurd, and the magical, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak asks what war does to those who see it firsthand - and how this witnessing reverberates to their descendants

ATLANTIC, Books of the Year 2022

Shortlisted for the National Book Award, Kochai's inventive début story collection details the toll that decades of war and the struggles of immigration have taken on Afghans and the Afghan diaspora in the United States

NEW YORKER, Books of the Year 2022

[Kochai's] short fiction defies expectations – readers' expectations of what a story should look like, and the story of a nation often told reductively and exclusively through media headlines

GUARDIAN

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is an endlessly inventive and moving collection, the work of a thrilling and capacious young talent. These stories surprise and charm and haunt in equal measure, while challenging the world as we think we know it. Jamil Jan Kochai is the real deal

JESS WALTER, author of Beautiful Ruins

Jamil Jan Kochai is a once-in-a-generation talent

KARAN MAHAJAN, author of The Association of Small Bombs

Kochai has a gift for knowing what makes the engine of a story turn over and go, what formal choices might deliver a narrative in such a way as to coax a reader to endure a set of experiences that, whatever their frequent delights - and the stories are uncommonly full of them - are rooted in sorrow, loss, and rage

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS