Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The first story in Jamil John

Kochi's new short story collection is called Playing Metal Gear Solid 5, The Phantom Pain.

And I remember reading it when it was first published in The New Yorker because I, too,

who have big thought about the Metal Gear franchise and knew exactly what he was talking about

when he referred to names like Revolver Acelot and Big Boss in the story. But the story is about

Afghanistan, depicted in a way once or twice removed, a figment of someone else's memory or imagination.

The full collection is called The Haunting of Haji Hotak,

and Kuchai talked to NPR's R. Shapiro about being displaced from Afghanistan. And they get

into this interesting discussion about balancing the focus on the Afghan characters, in spite of them

being haunted by invading Soviet and American forces.

Years ago, the author Jamil Junkuchai saw a satirical headline in The Onion.

It read, FBI counterterrorism agent wistfully recalls watching 20-year-old Muslim American grow up.

I thought it was totally funny, but also, like, oddly endearing.

That joke gave him the premise for the title story in his new book, The Haunting of Haji Hotak and other stories.

I was thinking about this character, and I was sort of watching him watch the family.

That's where sort of the central relationship of the story sort of builds up

as this narrator begins to also feel a very real bond to this family.

This family comes up again and again throughout Jamil John Kuchai's short stories.

It's largely autobiographical. My own family, we left Afghanistan.

Both my mother and my father's side came from a small village in Logad.

They experienced a tremendous warfare in the early 1980s because of the Soviet invasion.

There was really horrific bombings and violence there. And so they were forced to flee to Pakistan, from Pakistan.

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