“Discover Great New Writers” selection, and was long-listed for the 2018 Center for Fiction First Book Prize. Numerous media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Simple, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, named Brass a 2018 best book of the year. Previously, her debut story collection, Domesticated Wild Things, and Other Stories won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Aliu’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Glimmer Train, Hobart, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among other awards. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Aliu applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Everybody Says It's Everything, and reported the following:
Ah, on page 69, Drita spends a lonely Saturday night doing a little internet sleuthing:Visit Xhenet Aliu's website.The hits weren’t related to her brother, but some other Petrit DiMeo. They must have been, because the guy they referred to was some kind of a guerrilla soldier, somebody who’d signed up for something called the Kosovo Liberation Army. The articles were essentially duplicates of each other, reprints from a single wire service, but Drita clicked through them all, not because she thought she’d found her brother but because each tap killed a few more seconds, and it was novel to think of a parallel Petrit DiMeo out there in the world, one with convictions and a sense of purpose beyond scoring his next pack of Kools. Kosovo had been popping up in the news lately, but Drita assumed it was mostly because the news had to come up with something to fill the airwaves after Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, not because anyone actually knew or cared what was going on in a part of the world that not even the Peace Corps got involved with.Not to toot my own horn here, because it’s entirely accidental, but page 69 is a pretty darn perfect distillation of the main conflicts and themes of the book: the relationship between Drita and her estranged twin brother Petrit, a troubled young man who’s suddenly found a cause; and the twins’ Albanian identities, which, as adoptees raised outside of the culture in a working-class Connecticut city, they experience very differently. Beyond that, with the references to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and the Kosovo War, it clearly situates the reader in a specific time–early 1999, to be precise. What you can’t specifically tell from this page is that Drita isn’t Google-stalking here, because Google was barely a blip on the digital radar in 1999. Nope, she relied on some of the free AOL dial-up hours every sentient human received via CD-ROM in the late 90s. One of the most fun parts of writing this book for me was re-experiencing AOL’s homepages and chatrooms, which I did through a combination of the Wayback Machine and other cached screenshots, along with my own shoddy memory. Truthfully, I wasn’t an early adopter of AOL and never really went deep into Chat life, even as a lonely teenager who should’ve jumped at the chance to engage with other lonely teenagers (and the occasional, or probably frequent, middle-age man pretending to be a teenager). Drita was my chance at a late-90s AOL do-over.
But there was a human interest angle for the news to pick up on: a bunch of exiles and immigrant kids in the U.S. had volunteered to fight for the independence of their homeland, or their parents’ homeland, a place they maybe visited once or twice or, for some, never at all. One of the pieces had a photo to accompany it, and strangely, the photo showed a guy who looked a lot like her brother, if she could imagine her brother clean-shaven and wearing camouflage. And stranger still, the caption called this doppelgänger Petrit DiMeo, which at first amused Drita, and then, after she clicked on the photo to expand it in her screen, made her swat her empty wineglass to the floor.
This was no doppelgänger. That was Drita’s brother, Petrit DiMeo, staring back at her in black and white, his thick hair buzzed the way he wore it for the three months he played Pop Warner football in middle school.
--Marshal Zeringue
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