Description: A dazzling literary debut, Koolaids is a novel that shatters the dimension of time and mimes the chaos of contemporary experience Detailing the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the Lebanese civil war in Beirut on a circle of friends and family, Koolaids tells the stories of characters who can no longer love or think except in fragments of time, each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Clips, quips, vignettes and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, conversations with both the quick and the dead -- all shine their combined lights to reveal the way we experience life today in this ambitious novel reminiscent of Faulkner and Calvino. And through this intricate kaleidoscope of imagination, life's animus pulses as powerful, as irrepressible as waves beating on the shore.

"Koolaids is a wildly imaginative tour de force -- impressive, stunning. Alameddine's is the authentic voice of the prophet, speaking from the man-made wilderness of the late 20th century. Like all great prophets he speaks with equal parts of anger and love, in a crazy-quilt, Kundera-meets-Kushner narrative juxtaposing America's AIDS wards and the terrorist battlegrounds of Lebanon. Dark and funny and despairing and literate and finally, in its unvarnished truth, affirming; Amid all the craziness, I am here. We are here". -- Fenton Johnson, Author of Scissors

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