Arab American Heritage 2023

"A mysterious burnt corpse appears one morning in Saraaya, a remote border town between northern and southern Sudan. For five strangers on an NGO compound, the discovery foreshadows trouble to come. South Sudanese translator William connects the corpse to the sudden disappearance of cook Layla, a northern nomad with whom he's fallen in love. Meanwhile, Sudanese American filmmaker Dena struggles to connect to her unfamiliar homeland, and white midwestern...

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a caf̌ in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love...

"In mysterious circumstances, the body of Zakaria Mubarak is found in an orchard on the outskirts of his village of Tel Safra in northern Lebanon. He had just returned from a long exile in Europe, the US, and Africa, carrying with him a painting by Marc Chagall, the "Blue Violinist," a gift from his girlfriend in Paris. Suspicion falls on the cousins, who may have killed him to get their hands on a treasure supposedly buried underneath the house built...

"'Country of Origin' is a multigenerational family saga that cuts between political revolution in 1950s Egypt and the personal revolutions of four family members whose lives intersect around the disappearance of one of their own"-- "Seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new military-backed...

"It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is in full bloom when the discovery of two bodies in Beirut sows the first seeds of unrest in Lebanon. With houses already burning, Amin sets out to write down his memories of the country: Of the year 1994, when he returned as a teenager with his grandmother, twelve years after his parents' deaths. Of his friendship with Jafar, the boy who explored the desolate postwar landscape with him. And of the painful discovery...

"A graphic novel depicting the stories of women who fought with the National Liberation Front in the Algerian War of Independence"--

"From a "brilliant, absolutely essential voice" whose "poems feel like whole worlds" (Naomi Shihab Nye), a poetry collection considering the body physical, the body politic, and the body sacred. Zeina Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane, where she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying-from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and Zeina's...

"A quick, clever, warm-hearted debut about growing up in an Egyptian-Muslim family. Sara is growing up in a family with a lot of rules. Her mother tells her she's not allowed to wear a bikini, her father tells her she's not allowed to drink alcohol, and her grandmother tells her to never trust a man with her money. After leaving Egypt when Sara was only six years old, her family slowly learns how to navigate the social dynamics of their new home....

"What would you do if you grew up repeatedly seeing your home raided? Your parents arrested? Your mother shot? Your uncle killed? Try, if just for a moment, to imagine this was your life. How would you want the world to react?" Ahed Tamimi's father was born in 1967, the year that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began, and every aspect of their family's life has been touched by it. One of Ahed's earliest memories is visiting her father in prison,...