Mona

“[Mona] is as superbly audacious as it is intelligent and thought-provoking. A fierce, hilariously frank reflection about finding personal sovereignty through skin-baring rebellion.”
—Kirkus

“This is an extraordinary memoir. The writing and thinking is sparkling, excoriating, and laugh-out-loud funny. Azra Liaqat Khan’s Mona will entice anyone who loves peeking into the back rooms of other people’s lives (and who doesn’t). But more importantly, it demands readers do the crucial work of understanding the broader stage upon which all of us, in some form or another, are dancing.”
—Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

“Bold, hilarious, and fiercely political: a Salafist to Stripper story for the ages. Wildly entertaining, deeply thoughtful and unapologetically confronting, I loved every minute I spent reading it.”
—Nussaibah Younis, author of Fundamentally

“An unflinchingly honest account of a life brimming with secrets, Mona incisively demonstrates the daily tightrope walk of being a racialized, sexualized worker in the twenty-first-century United States. In a society marred by patriarchy, capitalism, and US imperialism, finding a measure of freedom requires extraordinary ingenuity and, perversely, it sometimes takes deception to live authentically. Told with biting humor, Azra Liaqat Khan’s memoir is a poignant reminder of how the personal is indeed political.”
—Jeff Schuhrke, author of No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine

“Mona is the propulsive dissection of a life negotiated in contradictions: domestic and religious orthodoxy against the New York strip club, academic impoverishment supplemented by lap dances, commodified desire capacious enough to bleed into earnest longing. It is also the account of a woman whose anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist politics uniquely position her to dispel the delusions of an industry that mandates these logics for its own erotic and economic survival. Khan’s storytelling is so sharp, so funny, and so immensely pleasurable that its many edifying revelations arrive as profound relief.”
—Jaime Hood, author of Trauma Plot: A Life