It's instead sharp and irreverent, sometimes even unapologetically crude. This collection is not flowery or sentimental, like many personal stories about the immigrant experience or Middle Eastern family life can be.

Instead I'm a hairstylist and I teach on the side. My parents once hoped I'd become a scientist, marry an Arab (even though there are none around), pop out three or four kids, and win the Nobel Prize for science. 'I use the head when I teach at Moda College. 'I just pulled into the farm and was lugging my mannequin head into the house when I found out about this,' writes Jarrar. Dina has disappointed her overbearing father and even feels the burn when she's grappling with her own personal crisis, like learning her brother is getting married before her. In 'Accidental Transients,' 29-year-old virgin Dina describes life on a farm with her Arab family. Often, they don't, so it's the nebulous in-between space where their lives unravel. Her own experience of moving between continents and cultures is reflected all over 'Him, Me, Muhammad Ali' through characters that always seem to be searching for that one place where they fit in. 'Him, Me, Muhammad Ali' follows Jarrar's award-winning novel, 2008's 'A Map of Home' about a girl growing up between the Middle East and the U.S. Jarrar, in her late 30s, is the American-born daughter of Palestinian and Egyptian parents and grew up in the Persian Gulf, Cairo and the East Coast. 'A Frame in the Sky' reads like an autobiographical account of Jarrar's own family experience of being forced to leave Kuwait after Iraq invaded in 1990. In 'A Sailor,' a woman who's grown apart from her husband tries to make him jealous - or at least care - by sleeping with a Turkish soldier.

'Lost in Freakin' Yonkers' finds a young, trash-talking Egyptian-American pregnant with her irresponsible boyfriend's baby much to the horror of her parents. There is no easy way to connect the dots between the mostly fictional female characters in 'Him, Me, Muhammad Ali,' Randa Jarrar's debut collection of short stories, except that they are all of Middle Eastern descent and all deviate from the usual perceptions many Americans have about Arab women. And another searches for the remnants of family in the bombed-out buildings of the Gaza Strip. Another is a child who's been kidnapped from a Pathmark in New Jersey by people kinder than her own mother. One is a tightrope walker in a French circus who tries to lasso the moon. 'Him, Me, Muhammad Ali' by Randa Jarrar Sarabande Books (216 pages, $15.95 paper)

Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar