Arab American Heritage Month 2022

"Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake 'Mustafa Bayoumi' was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an 'anti-American, pro-Islam' agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed. Others have endured far worse...

"The acclaimed, award-winning novelist--author of The Moor's Account and The Other Americans--now gives us a bracingly personal work of nonfiction that is concerned with the experiences of "conditional citizens." 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...

How the conflict between political Islamists and secular nationalists has shaped the history of the modern Middle East In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president--Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood--and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift in Egypt and the Middle...

In The Home that Was My Country, Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek chronicles her return to her family home in Damascus and the history of the Jabban apartment building. Here, generations of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Armenians lived, worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters. In telling the story of her family over the course of the last century, Alia brings to light the triumphs and failures that have led Syria to where it is today....

An award-winning young filmmaker and writer's funny and wry coming-of-age memoir about growing up in between the American and Arab cultures.

"Fugitive Atlas is a sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, an acute, probing journey through a world in upheaval. Khaled Mattawa's chorus of speakers finds moments of profound solace in searching for those lost-in elegy and prayer-even when the power of poem and faith seems incapable of providing salvation. With extraordinary formal virtuosity and global scope, these poems turn not to lament...

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother's ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother's sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush)....

"Winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the most important literary prize in the Arab world, The Italian tells an emblematic story of the shipwreck of the Arab Springs. In Tunisia at the turn of the 80s and 90s, an era of great tensions and political and social changes, the story of a revolutionary love and dream destined to succumb in the clash with the harsh reality of a country in which repression, malpractice and general degradation...

Locus Award for Best First Novel winner
Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist
Nebula Award for Best Novel finalist
David Gemmell Morningstar Award finalist
"Ahmed is a master storyteller in the grand epic tradition." —N. K. Jemisin

The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, home to djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, are at the boiling point of a power struggle between the iron- fisted Khalif and the

...

Sixteen-year-old Allie, aged seven when she knew her family was different and feared, struggles to claim her Muslim and Arabic heritage while finding her place as an American teenager.