A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind

The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.

In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.

But America is stifling her--her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging--all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.

[A] smart, sneering novel of capital and its consequences . . . In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, The Coin draws a dotted line between the narrator's grandmother's garden in Palestine and a splatter of excrement on New York City subway tiles; between her grandfather's birthplace of Bisan--'now a low-income town in Israel, housing mostly Jewish families from Morocco and no Palestinians'--Stokely Carmichael and a Gucci window display appropriating the language of revolution . . . The whiplash feels intentional, funny in an absurdist way, like the narrator's existential seesawing between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement . . . The novel's power is not in cohesion, but in chaos. --Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

LONGLISTED for the 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for TRANSLATED LITERATURE

The potent latest from Yazbek (Planet of Clay) weighs the consequences of the Syrian civil war after a 19-year-old soldier, Ali, survives his patrol station's 2013 bombing in the Lattakia mountains. This slim novel packs a punch.-Publishers Weekly

Ali, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole--is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn't there ... While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety. Through rich vignettes of Ali's memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life and hope and love.

Amid the alleyways of the Zamzam neighborhood of Tehran, a woman lights herself on fire in a desperate act of defiance, setting off a chain reaction of violence and protest. Haunted by the woman's death, Issa is forced to confront the contradictions of his own family history, throughout which his late brother Hashem, a prominent queer artist in Tehran's underground, had defied their father, a skilled martial artist bound to traditional notions of honor and masculinity.

Issa soon finds himself thrown into a circle of people living on the margins of society, negotiating a razor-like code of conduct that rewards loyalty and encourages aggression and intolerance in equal measure. As the city explodes around him, Issa realizes that it is the little acts of kindness that matter most, the everyday humanity of individuals finding love and doing right by one another.

Vibrant and evocative, intimate and intelligent, A Nearby Country Called Love is both a captivating window into contemporary Iran and a portrait of the parallel fates of a man and his country--a man who acknowledges the sullen and rumbling baggage of history but then chooses to step past its violent inheritance.

Based on the true story of two Jaffa teenagers, Mother of Strangers follows the daily lives of Subhi, a fifteen-year-old mechanic, and Shams, the thirteen-year-old student he hopes to marry one day. In this prosperous and cosmopolitan port city, with its bustling markets, cinemas, and cafés on the hills overlooking the Mediter­ranean Sea, we meet many other unforgettable charac­ters as well, including Khawaja Michael, the elegant and successful owner of orange groves above the harbor; Mr. Hassan, the tailor who makes Subhi's treasured English suit, which he hopes will change his life; and the very mischievous and outrageous Uncle Habeeb, who insists on introducing Subhi to the local bordello.

With a thriving orange export business, Jaffa had always been a city welcoming to outsiders--the Mother of Strangers--where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived peacefully together. Once the bombardment of the city begins in April 1948, Suad Amiry gives us the grim but fascinating details of the shock, panic, and destruc­tion that ensues. Jaffa becomes unrecognizable, with neighborhoods flattened, families removed from their homes and separated, and those who remain in constant danger of arrest and incarceration. Most of the popula­tion flees eastward to Jordan or by sea to Lebanon in the north or to Egypt and Gaza in the south. Subhi and Shams will never see each other again.

Suad Amiry has written a vivid and devastating ac­count of a seminal moment in the history of the Middle East--the beginning of the end of Palestine and a por­trait of a city irrevocably changed.

How far is love willing to travel in search of its own lost voice?

When tyranny unleashes destructive forces that threaten to overwhelm a country, what are the effects on the lives and choices of ordinary humans? When citizens become inhabitants of a land of extremes, what do they do, to whom do they flee?

Shadowing the days of Syria's Arab spring, Fadi Azzam's epic novel, Huddud's House--a haunting, contemporary novel rooted in the soil of Damascus, the oldest inhabited city in humanity--is a sprawling tale of love in time of war. Focusing on a quartet of characters torn between leaving and returning to Damascus, it follows intertwining stories of love and violence to their boundaries.

Azzam writes the spirit of resilience and resistance of the Syrian peoples. A saga on the dangers of ignoring threats or forgetting atrocities, he braves a long-distance search for his people's voice, one that violence cannot silence.

The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.

In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.

But America is stifling her--her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging--all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.

[A] smart, sneering novel of capital and its consequences . . . In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, The Coin draws a dotted line between the narrator's grandmother's garden in Palestine and a splatter of excrement on New York City subway tiles; between her grandfather's birthplace of Bisan--'now a low-income town in Israel, housing mostly Jewish families from Morocco and no Palestinians'--Stokely Carmichael and a Gucci window display appropriating the language of revolution . . . The whiplash feels intentional, funny in an absurdist way, like the narrator's existential seesawing between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement . . . The novel's power is not in cohesion, but in chaos. --Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

Kurdistan +100 poses a question to thirteen contemporary Kurdish writers: might the Kurds have a country to call their own by the year 2046--exactly a century after the last glimmer of independence (the short-lived Kurdish Republic of Mahabad)? Or might the struggle for independence have taken new turns and new forms?

Throughout the twentieth century (and so far in the twenty-first), the Kurds have been betrayed, suppressed, stripped of their basic rights (from citizenship to the freedom to speak their own language) and had their political aspirations crushed at every turn.

In this groundbreaking anthology, Kurdish authors (including several former political prisoners, and one currently serving a 183-year sentence for his views) imagine a freer future, one in which it is no longer effectively illegal to be a Kurd. From future eco-activism, to drone warfare, to the resuscitation of victims of past massacres, these stories explore different sides of the present struggle through the metaphor of futurism to dazzling effect.

Featuring Qadir Agid, Yıldız Çakar, Selahattin Demirtaş, Ömer Dilsoz, Muharrem Erbey, Nariman Evdike, Ava Homa, Hüseyin Karabey, Karzan Kardozi, Sema Kaygusuz, Jahangir Mahmoudveysi, Meral Şimşek, and Jîl Şwanî.

Translated by Amy Spangler, Nicholas Glastonbury, Andrew Penny, Mustafa Gundogdu, Rojin Hamo, Khazan Jangiz, Harriet Paintin, Darya Najim, Dibar Çelik, and Kate Ferguson.

Twenty-year-old Maya is given one hour to pack one suitcase and flee her home in war-torn Beirut, leaving behind everyone and everything she knows and loves. She rebuilds a new life in Los Angeles, and eventually launches a successful career in the aerospace industry. Despite professional opportunities and glamorous experiences in California, Maya is unable to escape her emotional attachment and sense of responsibility to her home country. She returns to Beirut where she meets a young surgeon, and together they believe they have a role to play in changing the trajectory of their war-torn nation.

Glass Cedars, by Katherine Saad Feghali, is engaging and fast-moving, historical fiction. The story crisscrosses cultures, taking the reader seamlessly between bomb scarred Beirut and the glitz of Los Angeles. It brings to life the richness of Lebanon's history and traditions and gives firsthand insight into the people of the Middle East.

A tale of fate, passion and conflict, Glass Cedars shows us of the value of friendship, how we are more similar than different, and reminds us life can change forever in a single instant.

A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family's flight from and return to Iran.

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah's expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.

1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.

1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.

2009. Laleh's brother Mo is more concerned with a friend's heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down ...

A topical, moving novel about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.

The first English translation of one of the novels that helped change modern Arab literature

Mohamed Choukri, one of the most important writers of modern Moroccan literature, grew up in extreme poverty in Tangier and was illiterate until the age of twenty. After learning to read, he realized that writing could also be a way to expose, to protest against those who have stolen my childhood, my teenage-hood and a piece of my youthfulness. His vivid portrayals of marginalized people, which had been considered taboo, led to the censorship of his work and a cultural backlash in the Middle East.

In Faces, the third book in his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographical works, he describes gritty events, extreme poverty, prostitution, violence, sexual revelry, deprivation, and abuse. It is through his storytelling that Choukri reflects on human nature, love, and kindness-emphasizing the need for community and collaboration. Faces humanizes those undergoing poverty and places the blame for the violence they encounter squarely on colonial forces and the resulting postcolonial government, while opening literary traditions to a new style of writing.

Choukri's friendships with Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, and other writers brought him attention in his lifetime. But Faces-his last novel, which was originally published in Arabic in 2000-has remained untranslated until now. In English for the first time, Jonas Elbousty's translation allows Choukri's work to reach wider international discussions of contemporary Arab literature.

The novel is set in Baghdad following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein and unleashed chaos. At the center of the narrative is a young woman, Ghosnelban, who belongs to what would have been an aristocratic family under the former Iraqi monarchy and sees herself and her family as guardians of an aristocratic code of noble values and traditions. She witnesses her world and family life collapsing as the violence around her intensifies.

The story encompasses three generations of the same family, and shows the effects of successive coups and wars on Iraqi society by focusing on the uprooting of a well-establish family that has deep roots in Iraq.

Ghosnelban interprets the events unfolding around her through detailed descriptive analysis of seven paintings hanging on the walls of a formal reception room in the family's palatial villa. The family's fate embodies the wider ruination affecting the country at large.

One of the most unusual literary innovations ever produced, A Life Full of Holes is the result of a singular collaboration between two remarkable individuals: Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, an illiterate North African servant and street vendor, and legendary American novelist and essayist Paul Bowles. The powerful story of a shepherd and petty trafficker struggling to maintain hope as he wrestles with the grim realities of daily life, it is the first novel ever written in the Arabic dialect Moghrebi, faithfully recorded and translated into English by Bowles. Straightforward yet rich in complex emotions, it is a fascinating inside look at an unfamiliar culture--harsh and startling, yet interwoven with a poignant, poetic beauty.

Shortlisted for the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize

Modern-day Beirut is seen through the eyes of a failed writer, the eponymous Mister N. He has left his comfortable apartment and checked himself into a hotel--he thinks. Certainly, they take good care of him there. Meanwhile, on the streets below, a grim pageant: there is desperate poverty, the ever-present threat of violence, and masses of Syrian refugees planning to reach Europe via a dangerous sea passage.

How is anyone supposed to write deathless prose in such circumstances? Let alone an old man like Mister N., whose life and memories have become scattered, whose family regards him as an embarrassment, and whose next-door neighbours torment him with their noise, dinner invitations, and inconvenient suicides. Comical and tragic by turns, his misadventures climax in the arrival in what Mister N. had supposed to be his real life of a character from one of his early novels--a vicious militiaman and torturer. Now, does the old writer need to arm himself . . . or just seek psychiatric help?

The war between Iran and Iraq is in its fourth year, and the city of Baghdad is under missile attack from Iran.

It is a place where a fleeing former terrorist might find solace from a world; but he soon finds out his escape from his pursuers was sponsored by others and he soon finds out that nothing comes without 'pay back!'

He acquires work with the Iraqi Oil Institute, and finds his duties include monitoring some illicit structures that when completed will change the balance of the war in the most appalling circumstances.

For a while he remains undetected and enjoys life to the full, but he is destined to meet someone that will set him on a bridge that he cannot ever cross, although temptation may be greater than the will power he has to offer!

The great Persian epic known as the Kushnameh follows the entangled lives of Kush the Tusked--a monstrous antihero with tusks and ears like an elephant, descended from the evil emperor Zahhak--and Abtin, the exiled grandson of the last true Persian emperor. Abandoned at birth in the forests of China and raised by Abtin, Kush grows into a powerful and devious warrior. Kush and his foes scheme and wage war across a global stage reaching from Spain and Africa to China and Korea. Between epic battles and magnificent feasts are disturbing, sometimes realistic portrayals of abuse and oppression and philosophical speculation about nature and nurture and the origins of civilization.

A fantastical adventure story stretching across the known world and a literary classic of unparalleled richness, this important work of medieval Persian literature is a valuable source for understanding the history of racism and constructions of race and the flows of lore and legend from the Central Asian Silk Road and the Sahara to the sea routes of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. The Kushnameh is a treasure trove of Islamic and pre-Islamic Persian cultural history and a striking contemporary document of the global middle ages, now available to English-speaking readers for the first time.

Tashari, the title of the novel in Arabic, is an Iraqi word for a shot from a hunting rifle, which scatters creatures in all directions. The word tashari expresses the scattering of Iraqis as a people across the globe and the separation from home and loved ones that pursues them.

The Dispersal, follows the career of Wardiyah Iskander, a physician working in the Iraq countryside in the 1950s. Delivering babies and tending to the many health needs of her rural women patients, she struggles to improve care for them. But as the years pass, the upheavals the country faces continue to worsen. Her family, like many others, is pressed to leave. Wardiyah finally goes, arriving in France. There her poet niece helps her now elderly aunt to get settled and, reflecting on their family's dispersal, to tell her story.

Wardiyah develops a bond with her niece's son Iskander, who has grown up in France alienated from his extended family, his language, and his culture. As he gets to know his great-aunt, the doctor, he learns more about his people's calamities and extraordinary heritage. He is inspired to construct a virtual graveyard online, a digital resting place where families can be reunited again.

Inaam Kachachi's unhurried, spontaneous reflection on the closest ties of family evokes quiet power and beauty, relayed by the warmth of Inam Jaber's translation. Throughout it, Doctor Wardiyah's journey conveys her dedication to the healing properties of trust and belonging, treasures lost whenever any homeland falls prey to the Beast of division and conflict.

Passage to Dusk deals with the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s in a postmodern, poetic style. The narrative focuses on the deranged, destabilized, confused, and hyper-perceptive state of mind created by living on the scene through a lengthy war. The story is filled with details that transcend the willed narcissism of the main character, while giving clues to the culture of the time. It is excellent fiction, written in a surrealistic mode, but faithful to the characters of the people of Lebanon, their behavior during the war, and their contradictions. Issues of gender and identity are acutely portrayed against Lebanon's shifting national landscape.

The English-language reader has not been much exposed to Lebanese literature in translation, and Rashid al-Daif is one of Lebanon's leading writers. He has been translated into eight languages, including French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. Translator Nirvana Tanoukhi manages to preserve Daif's unusual, moving, and at times humorous style in her English rendition.