Celebrate Arab American Heritage Month with this staff-curated selection of fiction and nonfiction titles spotlighting Arab authors, stories, and experiences.
Fiction Books | Nonfiction Books
It's the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents' roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance. Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?
Amani is hooked on a mystery - a poem on airmail paper that slips out of one of her father's books. It seems to have been written by her grandmother, a refugee who arrived in Jordan during the First World War. Soon the perfect occasion to investigate arises: her Uncle Hafez, an advisor to the King of Jordan, invites her father to celebrate the king's 60th birthday. Her father has avoided returning to his homeland for decades, but Amani persuades him to come with her. Uncle Hafez will make their time in Jordan complicated - and dangerous - after Amani discovers a missing relative and is launched into a journey of loss, history, and, eventually, a fight for her own life. Fencing with the King masterfully draws on King Lear and Arthurian fable to explore the power of inheritance, the trauma of displacement, and whether we can release the past to build a future.
Three superheroes in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms bound together by a series of magical murders must work together in a race against time to prevent a sorcerer's plot from destroying the world.
Foreseeing blessings and troubles in the lives of her daughter and grandchildren, Salma endures hardships stemming from the Six-Day War of 1967 in Palestine before rebuilding in Kuwait, before the family is scattered by Saddam Hussein's regime.
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: 'You exist too much, ' she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East -- from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine -- Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer.
A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great aunt's secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage. In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us-and even wield the power to restore a broken family.
Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families--the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars--Palestinian immigrants who've all found a different welcome in America. Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose own family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for "dishonoring" their name. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.
In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honor an ancient pact to sing to them in thanks for their magic--none more devotedly than the family's latest daughters Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees. But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters' bond but also their lives will be at risk.
The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish--allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.
Arabilious contains nine short stories written by authors coming from Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. The themes of the stories include the effects of new technologies on Arab society, deeply rooted in community life and far from Western individualism, as well as anxiety about the devastation produced by climate emergency or nostalgia for a past which, although difficult and troubled, it is still able to ensure cultural roots and identity to the characters. The stories included in Arabilious are therefore full of melancholy, social tensions derived from political conflicts, and the need to distance themselves from the categories and clichés formulated by the West. All these themes mix with the rich literary tradition of the Arab peoples and their past as colonized communities to propose nine futuristic scenarios, alternatives to the existing reality.
In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes--now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar--appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz's nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, open up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women all float through these affecting brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber.
Author, illustrator, and translator Deena Mohamed presents a literary, feminist, Arab-centric graphic novel that marries magic and the socio-political realities of contemporary Egypt. Shubeik Lubeik-a fairytale rhyme meaning "Your Wish is My Command" in Arabic-is the story of three characters navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale; mired in bureaucracy and the familiar prejudices of our world, the more expensive the wish, the more powerful and therefore the more likely to work as intended. The novel's three distinct parts tell the story of three first class wishes as used by Aziza, Nour, and Shokry, each grappling with the challenge inherent in trying to make your most deeply held desire come true. Shubeik Lubeik heralds the arrival of a huge new talent and a brave, literary, political, and feminist new voice in comics.
Raised in a conservative and emotionally volatile Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur who took her to the suburbs. She's gotten to follow her dreams, completing an undergraduate degree in art and landing a good job at the local college. As a traditional wife, she also raises their two school-aged daughters, takes care of the house, and has dinner ready when her husband gets home. With her family balanced with her professional ambitions, Yara knows that her life is infinitely more rewarding than her own mother's. So why doesn't it feel like enough?
Arabella, a New York theatre director facing dwindling career prospects, accepts a chance to stage a bold Shakespeare adaptation in the West Bank, while her grandmother Zoya plots a match with Palestinian American doctor Aziz, triggering a multi-generational tale spanning from 1940s Jaffa to 2012 Palestine.
Spanning several decades, Ghassan Zeineddine's debut collection examines the diverse range and complexities of the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. In ten tragicomic stories, Zeineddine explores themes of identity, generational conflicts, war trauma, migration, sexuality, queerness, home and belonging, and more. In Dearborn, a father teaches his son how to cheat the IRS and hide their cash earnings inside of frozen chickens. Tensions heighten within a close-knit group of couples when a mysterious man begins to frequent the local gym pool, dressed in Speedos printed with nostalgic images of Lebanon. And a failed stage actor attempts to drive a young Lebanese man with ambitions of becoming a Hollywood action hero to LA, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have other plans.
Hadi and Sama are a young Syrian couple in the throes of new love, building a life in the country that brought them together ... Now they giddily await the birth of their son, a boy whose native language would be freedom and belonging. When Sama is five months pregnant, Hadi's father dies in Amman the night before the embassy interview that would finally reunite Hadi with his parents and deliver them from a country in crisis. Hadi flies back to the Middle East for the funeral, promising he'll be gone only a few days. On the day his flight is due to arrive in Boston, Sama decides to surprise him at the airport, eager to scoop him up and bring him back home. She waits, and waits. There are protests at Logan airport, and Hadi never shows up. What Sama doesn't yet know is that Hadi has been stopped at the border.
Arriving in Canada at age 12 from Sudan, Elamin's teenage years were spent trying on new ways of relating to his almost universally white peers. In this extraordinary debut collection, the process of growing--of trying, failing, and trying again to fit in--is cast against the backdrop of the memory of life in a different time, and different place--a Khartoum being bombed by the United States, a nation seeking to define and understand itself against global powers of infinite reach. Taken together, these essays explore how we pick and choose from our experience and environment to help us in the ongoing project of defining who we are. With the perfect balance of relatable humor and intellectual ferocity, Son of Elsewhere confronts what we know about ourselves, and most important, what we're still learning.
Coming-of-age story about a young boy named Ahmad struggling to find his place in the world. Raised in a refugee camp called Baddawi in northern Lebanon, Ahmad is just one of the thousands of Palestinians who fled their homeland after the war in 1948 established the state of Israel. In this visually arresting graphic novel, Leila Abdelrazaq explores her father's childhood in the 1960s and '70s from a boy's eye view as he witnesses the world crumbling around him and attempts to carry on, forging his own path in the midst of terrible uncertainty.
Arabiyya celebrates the alluring aromas and flavors of Arab food and the welcoming spirit with which they are shared. Written from her point of view as an Arab in diaspora, Reem takes readers on a journey through her Palestinian and Syrian roots, showing how her heritage has inspired her recipes for flatbreads, dips, snacks, platters to share, and more. With a section specializing in breads of the Arab bakery, plus recipes for favorites such as Salatet Fattoush, Falafel Mahshi, Mujaddarra, and Hummus Bil Awarma, Arabiyya showcases the origins and evolution of Arab cuisine and opens up a whole new world of flavor.
On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: 'One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.' This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. This book chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, and Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal, an ode to the steadfastness of a nation. Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a "Settler colonial state" continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial. Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination.
What is political poetry? How does history become lived experience? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? Noor Hindi’s poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency. This collection is ultimately a provocation―on trauma, on art, on what it takes to change the world.
From Slate staff writer Aymann Ismail comes an exquisite memoir about fatherhood, religion, and the search for identity in an ever-shifting, increasingly divided world. The son of Egyptian immigrants, Aymann Ismail came of age in the shadow of 9/11, tracking the barrage of predatory headlines pervading the media and influencing the popular consciousness about Muslims. What does it mean to be a Muslim man? More still, what does it mean to be any man-and a father to a baby boy and girl? In lucid, confident prose, Aymann Ismail questions the sturdy frameworks of religion and family, the legacies of his childhood, and what will become his children's ethical and intellectual inheritance.
An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering.
What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth--such as national origin, race, or gender--that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people whom America embraces with one arm, and pushes away with the other. Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together the author's own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.
With honesty and curiosity, British-born Omani-Zanzibari chef Dina Macki explores the unique foodscape of Oman, in the first Omani cookbook to be written by an Omani chef. Bahari, meaning "ocean" in Swahili, is a culinary exploration of the rich flavors and history of Omani cuisine, a food culture shaped by boundless coastlines and complex maritime history, with origins and influences spanning Pakistan, Iran, India, the Swahili coast, and Portugal. In this distinctive cookbook, Dina Macki travels across Oman and Zanzibar, unearthing regional delicacies and recreating the food of her heritage. With more than 90 recipes for meat, fish, and vegetables, homemade breads and dips, desserts and drinks, Macki invites us into her kitchen, showing us how to create exquisite Omani dishes at home.
In 2012, after the overthrow of Qaddafi, the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar journeys to his native Libya after an absence of thirty years. When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later Matar's father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime's most notorious prison. Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballah Matar will be found alive. Yet, as the author writes, hope is "persistent and cunning." This book is a profoundly moving family memoir, a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power.
This fascinating book presents 28 traditional Arabic tales in parallel English and Arabic versions on facing pages. Each story is accompanied by a vocabulary list, cultural notes, and exercises to help beginning students. The stories increase in length and complexity as the book progresses, and free online audio recordings of the Arabic and English versions are available online. This book is not only an accessible language resource for self-study, but also a wonderful book for anyone who wants to learn about Arabic culture through charming folktales!
The Fox Hunt tells one young man’s unforgettable story of war, unlikely friendship, and his harrowing escape from Yemen's brutal civil war with the help of a daring plan engineered on social media by a small group of interfaith activists in the West.
Though author Manal Al-Sharif grew up as a devoutly fundamentalist Muslim in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, she later received a technical education that led to a job as a computer security engineer. In Daring to Drive, she relates how she publicized a protest movement, the Women2Drive campaign, with a video recording of herself driving a car. This eye-opening memoir vividly portrays the customary restrictions on girls and women in her country as well as the difficulties of pushing for social change.