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Fencing with the King
by Diana Abu-Jaber
Amani discovers a poem on an airmail paper that slipped out of one of her father's books, and becomes determined to learn more about its author, her grandmother, who arrived in Jordan during World War I.
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Muslims of the Heartland : How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest
by Edward E Curtis IV
The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them.
Edward E. Curtis IV, a descendant of Syrian Midwesterners, vividly portrays the intrepid men and women who busted sod on the short-grass prairies of the Dakotas, peddled needles and lace on the streets of Cedar Rapids, and worked in the railroad car factories of Michigan City.
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From Baghdad to Brooklyn : Growing Up in a Jewish-Arabic family in Midcentury America : A Memoir
by Jack Marshall
Inspired by the posthumous discovery of letters written by his father but never mailed, Jack Marshall’s memoir is both a moving story of a writer’s artistic coming-of-age and a lush, lyrical recollection of a childhood spent in Brooklyn’s Arabic-speaking Jewish community. Born in 1936 to an Iraqi father and Syrian mother who had immigrated to the United States, Marshall grew up in the hardworking Sephardic community—enveloped in an extended family that spoke little English, no Yiddish, and whose way of life owed more to their Middle Eastern homelands than to European Jewish traditions.
As the sights, sounds, and tastes of midcentury New York leap off the page, Marshall beautifully evokes the magic of youth and discovery. From playing “running bases” in the Brooklyn streets to making egg creams at Coney Island, from his mother’s rich kibbeh and baklava to the vast world revealed in the books of the New York Public Library, from the pleasures of music to the mysteries contained under a microscope, Marshall’s story is as enduring as it is original.
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Life Without a Recipe : A Memoir
by Diana Abu-Jaber
A follow-up to The Language of Baklava continues the story of the author's struggles with cross-cultural values and how they shaped her coming of age and her culinary life, tracing her three marriages, her literary ambitions and her midlife decision to become a parent.
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The Thirty Names of Night: A Novel
by Zeyn Joukhadar
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. The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria, but he’s been struggling ever since his mother’s ghost began visiting him each evening.
One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting birds. She mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths.
What happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save? Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.
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The Map of Salt and Stars
by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
Living eight hundred years apart, two girls, a modern day Syrian refugee and a medieval apprentice to a legendary mapmaker, experience the pain of exile and triumph of courage.
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The Wrong End of The Telescope
by Rabih Alameddine
A novel from the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman is about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island.
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Crescent
by Diana Abu-Jaber
Never married, living with an Iraqi-immigrant uncle and devoted dog, and working as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, thirty-nine-year-old Sirine finds her life turned upside down by a handsome Arabic literature professor who not only awakens unexpected feelings but also stirs up memories of her parents and questions about her Arab-American identity. By the author of Arabian Jazz.
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A Map of Home : A Novel
by Randa Jarrar
Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates her story from her childhood in Kuwait, her early teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), to her family's last flight to Texas.
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The Arab Americans : A History
by Gregory Orfalea
Uses historical narrative, personal memoir, and profiles based on interviews to describe the Arab American experience from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
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