Q&A with Xhenet Aliu

From my Q&A with Xhenet Aliu, author of Everybody Says It's Everything: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Disembodied from the text, the title Everybody Says It’s Everything plays with the ambiguity of the indefinite pronouns “everybody” and “everything” in a way I find kind of fun and mysterious. Who’s everybody, what’s everything? Tell me, book, tell me! Spoiler alert: the story pretty explicitly clarifies that the title refers to family, which is very much what the story is about, despite the backdrop of a real-life geopolitical conflict, i.e., the Kosovo War. The title is extracted directly from a piece of dialogue in the book, in fact, though landing on it was a real struggle. Before that, the working title was Eagle Calling, which referred to the name of a fictionalized group of Albanian expats collecting funds and weapons for the Kosovo war; it works fine for that purpose, but as a book title, it read like...[read on]

Visit Xhenet Aliu's website.

The Page 69 Test: Everybody Says It's Everything.

Q&A with Xhenet Aliu.

--Marshal Zeringue