Maya Binyam's second novel, Holy Fool, is about a former political prisoner who lives below his would-be executioner, in a basement apartment near Boston's Fenway Park. He is bald, middle-aged, and works as a limo driver, though much else about him is unknown. He parcels out the biographical details of his existence reluctantly and haphazardly, and identifies more readily with the proprietary objects of his consumption than with the past. In the novel's opening scene, he receives a phone call from a man who has just arrived from their shared home country, but who claims not to speak their native language. When the narrator picks him up, it becomes clear that this nameless stranger — whom the narrator refers to only as "the guy" — has nowhere to go. When the narrator takes him in, his secrets, which up until their encounter have manifested only as neuroses, are forced into articulation. 

Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Dublin Literary Award; Hangman was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the BBC. Maya is the recipient of the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize and the 2026 John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize in Literature. Her fiction, criticism, and reporting have appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Bookforum, New York Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. She is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.