Imad Rahman

Imad Rahman is a Pakistani-American fiction writer whose first short story collection was published in 2004.

Quotes

Short fiction

The Brigadier-General Takes His Final Stand, by James Butt (2013)

Page numbers are from the original publication of the story in Kate Bernheimer (ed.), xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (2013), published by Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0-14-312242-5

• “People like me,” he says, “are either in power and fighting to stay in power, or we are not in power and fighting to be in power.”
  • p. 335

• Men like me, we are necessary because we unite those we recruit to keep us in power, and we unite those who have been recruited to put different versions of us in power. It is just like Woody Allen says, in a revolution oppressors become oppressed and vice versa.
  • pp. 335-336

• “How did he die?”
  “Firing squad.”
  The Brigadier-General snorts. “I do not much care for comedies,” he says.
  • p. 337

• Does circumstance reveal character or create it?
  • p. 338

• Is this dementia, desperation, or Machiavellian mischief? It occurs to me that the course of the world is perhaps set in motion but idiocy so convoluted it is rendered complex.
  • p. 343

• Real refugees live in real refugee camps. Photo opportunities with celebrities call for movie sets. Army privates, starved for weeks and stuck in the stockade, are conscripted to act like refugees and thereafter either assassinated or promoted, depending on the things that these sorts of things usually depend on.
  • p. 344