Collection: Shop Middle Eastern

An unflinching story about Arab masculinity and homoeroticism.

Furat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibki Park in Damascus, one of the city's most popular cruising areas. There he learns about the hammams, secret meeting places for gay men located throughout the old city. Inside these public baths, the air is thick with the scent of bay laurel soap, and naked men hide in the steam. Furat faces sometimes violent disapproval from all levels of society--regime, religion, the man in the street--and yet he manages to find the love he's been seeking just before his world collapses and he's forced to flee. Selamlik is the story of Furat's journey, along with that of other refugees. It's a journey in which they face physical and economic hardship, draconian migration laws, and the unwelcome grief, shame, and hatred they've carried with them from their ever more distant pasts. Despite everything, Furat remains steadfast in his pursuit of passion, pleasure, and love.

The New York Times bestselling author of Ottolenghi Flavor reimagines comfort food with over 100 global, personal recipes.

Yotam Ottolenghi--the beloved chef who has captured the hearts of homecooks looking for inspiration and great-tasting cooking--is back. In Ottolenghi Comfort, he brings his inspiring, flavor-forward cooking to comfort dishes.

With game-changing low-lift recipes as well as recipes to spend an afternoon on, Ottolenghi Comfort presents creative dishes that are comfortable to both cook and eat. In more than 100 recipes, Ottolenghi--and co-authors Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley--bring together childhood memories and travels around the world, celebrating food and friends and the connections they build together, ones to pass on from generation to generation.

For Ottolenghi, a bowl of pasta becomes Caramelized Onion Orecchiette with Hazelnuts & Crispy Sage, a warming soup is Cheesy Bread Soup with Savoy Cabbage & Cavolo Nero, and potatoes are transformed into Garlicky Aligot Potato with Leeks & Thyme. In Comfort, he tackles everything from crepes to hummus; lamb meatloaf to quick ramen; savory rugelah to chocolate mousse.

This is a book filled with meals that are easy and exciting, familiar and fresh, new and nostalgic, revelatory yet reassuring.

Winner of the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press's 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize

National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Finalist

"Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha's accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."-The New York Times

In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.

These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.

Accompanied by an in-depth interview (conducted by Ammiel Alcalay) in which Abu Toha discusses life in Gaza, his family origins, and how he came to poetry.

Praise for Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear:

"Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishingly gifted young poet from Gaza, almost a seer with his eloquent lyrical vernacular ... His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life."--Naomi Shihab Nye

"Though forged in the bleak landscape of Gaza, he conjures a radiance that echoes Milosz and Kabir. These poems are like flowers that grow out of bomb craters and Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishing talent to celebrate."--Mary Karr

"Mosab Abu Toha's Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear arrives with such refreshing clarity and voice amidst a sea of immobilizing self-consciousness. It is no great feat to say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but here is a poet who says it plain: 'In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.' Later, 'This is how we survived.' It's remarkable. This is poetry of the highest order."--Kaveh Akbar

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 a pyramid 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.

Set in a country where being gay is punishable by law, These Letters End in Tears is the heart-wrenching forbidden love story of a Christian girl with a rebellious heart and a Muslim girl leading a double life

Bessem notices Fatima for the first time on the soccer field--muscular and focused, she's the only woman playing and seems completely at ease. When Fatima chases a rogue ball in her direction, Bessem freezes, mesmerized by the athlete's charm and beauty. One playful wink from Fatima, and Bessem knows her life will never be the same.

In Cameroon, a country where same-sex relationships are punishable by law, the odds are stacked against Bessem and Fatima from the start. And when Fatima's older brother, a staunch Muslim, finds out about their affair, he intervenes by physically assaulting them, an incident that precedes a police raid at the only gay bar in town. After spending days in jail, Fatima goes missing without a trace, and Bessem is left with only rumors of her whereabouts. Has Fatima been sentenced to an unknown prison? Has she been banished from her community, or married off, as some have suggested? Or something even more sinister?

Thirteen years later, Bessem is now a university professor leading a relatively quiet life, occasionally and secretly dating other women. However, she has never forgotten Fatima. After spotting a mutual friend for the first time in years--the last person who may have seen Fatima--Bessem embarks on a winding search for her lost love.

2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Gold Winner

2018 Levis Reading Prize Winner

2017 Julie Suk Award Winner

A 2017 Nautilus Silver Award Winner

2017 Florida Book Award Gold Winner

A 2018 First Horizon Award Winner

Winner of the 2017 John C. Zacharis First Book Award

A 2018 Montaigne Medal Finalist

A 2017 NPR Best Book of the Year

A 2017 Library Journal Best Book of the Year

A 2017 Entropy Magazine Best Book of the Year

A 2017 The Coil Best Book of the Year

A 2017 Interview Best Book of the Year

Addiction. Recovery. Repeat. Akbar blazes the poetry scene with this introspective, powerful, and passionate debut.

This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

from "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before"

Sometimes you just have to leave

whatever's real to you, you have to clomp

through fields and kick the caps off

all the toadstools. Sometimes

you have to march all the way to Galilee

or the literal foot of God himself before you realize

you've already passed the place where

you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember

the being afraid, only that it came to an end.

Stonewall Book Award Winner * A Best Book of the Year from the Guardian, ALA Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage

From the award-winning author of Like a Love Story comes a sweeping story of three generations of boys in the same Iranian family. Perfect for fans of Last Night at the Telegraph Club and Darius the Great Is Not Okay.

2019. Moud is an out gay teen living in Los Angeles with his distant father, Saeed. When Moud gets the news that his grandfather in Iran is dying, he accompanies his dad to Tehran, where the revelation of family secrets will force Moud into a new understanding of his history, his culture, and himself.

1978. Saeed is an engineering student with a promising future ahead of him in Tehran. But when his parents discover his involvement in the country's burgeoning revolution, they send him to safety in America, a country Saeed despises. And even worse--he's forced to live with the American grandmother he never knew existed.

1939. Bobby, the son of a calculating Hollywood stage mother, lands a coveted MGM studio contract. But the fairy-tale world of glamour he's thrust into has a dark side.

Set against the backdrop of Tehran and Los Angeles, this tale of intergenerational trauma and love is an ode to the fragile bonds of family, the hidden secrets of history, and all the beautiful moments that make us who we are today.

From Time 100 honoree Saad Mohseni, the deeply moving and surprising story of the attempt to build a truly independent media company in contemporary Afghanistan.

Saad Mohseni, chairman and CEO of Moby Group, Afghanistan's largest media company, charts a twenty-year effort to bring a free press to his country after years of Taliban rule, and how that effort persists even after the Taliban's return to power in 2021.

In the heady early days of the American occupation, Mohseni returns to Kabul which he had last seen as a child before the Soviet invasion. Casting about for ways to be involved in the dawn of a new Afghanistan, Mohseni makes what seems like a quixotic decision to leave the comforts of a career in international banking to start a Kabul radio station with his three siblings. This unlikely venture quickly blossoms into a burgeoning television empire, bringing Mohseni and his family and employees into sometimes uncomfortable contact with everyone who has a stake in the country--from the government of Hamid Karzai to White House officials. Moreover, their radio and television networks soon become a necessary beacon for millions of Afghans, who rely on them not just for independent news but for joyful pleasures like soap operas and Afghan Star, a beloved national singing competition in a country whose previous rulers had banned (and would again ban) music.

Mohseni's position at Moby affords him unique insights into this extraordinary yet troubled country, the youngest in the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and his powerful account captures the spirit and resilience of the Afghan people--notably the hundreds of men and women still working in Moby's Kabul office today, who, once again under Taliban rule, create programs, report the news, and educate the public.

Radio Free Afghanistan is a stunning, vibrant portrait of a nation in turmoil, poised between despair and hope.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times.

Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos--the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.

In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall--hailed for his "severe allergy to conventional wisdom" (Time)--offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

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.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell's 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor's Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.

From the beloved chef and owner of Edy's Grocer, a deeply personal celebration of Lebanese flavors adopted for the modern home cook.

Born in a small fishing village in Lebanon, Edy Massih grew up eating and cooking alongside his Teitas (grandmothers) Odette and Jacquo, who taught him the secret to delicious Lebanese food, including how to roll garlic labneh balls and bind homemade kibbeh by hand. Growing up in America from the age of ten, Edy steadily built his career as a chef and caterer on these dishes and many more from his native land. But in 2020, the pandemic nearly derailed his dreams. Then a beloved deli in his Brooklyn neighborhood--run by his adopted Teita, Maria--was up for grabs. Maria decided to retire and turn the keys over to Edy. The new sign, Edy's Grocer, went up and the Lemony Corner of Brooklyn was born.

In Keep It Zesty, Edy shares his story and more than 115 easy-to-follow recipes for some of his favorite dishes--traditional Lebanese fare with a modern twist. Infused with the zestiness and positivity he brings to everyday life, Keep It Zesty offers everything adventurous home cooks need to whip up a delicious weeknight meal and entertain guests. Edy shows you how to build your own Brown Paper Board (the super-sized charcuterie board of your dreams), alongside recipes for mouthwatering starters like Orangey Date Carrot Dip and Spicy Fig Jam; show-stopping breakfasts such as Rosewater Raspberry Dutch Baby and Tomato Halloumi Skillet; Za'atar Chicken Thighs and Everything Sumac Salmon with Sweetie Tahini Eggplant and other mouthwatering weeknight dishes; Pistachio-Crusted Lamb Chops and Shawarma Chicken Taco Night to wow even the most difficult of guests; and sweets and drinks from Pistachio Halva Rice Krispies to Jallab Rosey Iced Tea. Plus, you'll find easy tips and tricks from a one-man catering (and Grocer-owning) powerhouse.

In addition to his amazing dishes, Edy includes helpful recipe charts for easy customization--accompanied by odes to Middle Eastern pantry staples, more than 100 truly stunning photographs of food and lovingly preserved family pictures, and heartwarming essays dedicated to the women in his life who shaped Edy along the way.

Delicious, accessible, bursting with flavor and full of the joy of life, this rich cookbook introduces a young culinary star on the rise and inspires home cooks everywhere to keep it zesty!

A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK - MEET THE MILANIS. FAST-FOOD HEIRESSES, L.A. ROYALTY, AND YOUR NEWEST REALITY TV OBSESSION

Iranian-American multimillionaires Ali and Homa Milani have it all--a McMansion in the hills of Los Angeles, a microwaveable snack empire, and four spirited daughters. There's Violet, the big-hearted aspiring model; Roxanna, the chaotic influencer; Mina, the chronically-online overachiever; and the impressionable health fanatic Haylee. On the verge of landing their own reality TV show, the Milanis realize their deepest secrets are about to be dragged out into the open before the cameras even roll.

Each of the Milanis--even their aloof Persian cat Pari--has something to hide, but the looming scrutiny of fame also threatens to bring the family closer than ever. Dramatic, biting yet full of heart, Tehrangeles is a tragicomic saga about high-functioning family dysfunction and the ever-present struggle to accept one's true self.

The New Yorker's Best Book of 2023

"sorrowful, tender...beautiful." - The New York Times Book Review

"...arresting and memorable....Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience." - Financial Times

"Sharply, subtly, and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life." - Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

A surprising and lyrical journey--part memoir, part nature book--meditating on the meaning of "flatness" and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature's most undervalued wonders.

For readers of Dr. Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal, Robert Macfarlane, G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure

Does the concept of "flat" have an undeservedly bad rap? There are centuries' worth of adoration for rolling hills and dramatic, mountainous landscapes. In contrast, flat landscapes are forgettable and seemingly unworthy of poetic or artistic attention.

Noreen Masud suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.

Masud's British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet.

Masud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. A Flat Place is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place -- bodily and psychologically -- and the healing properties of literature and landscape.

From the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family-past, present, future-in the face of displacement and war.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection--a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form--small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body--and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?

"Blood Orange" is a highly emotional, important and timely poetry collection by Mx. Yaffa (They/She), a trans Muslim displaced Indigenous Palestinian. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of indigenous Palestinians.

The collection came quickly and relentlessly, drawn from the depths of the author's soul during a movement for a free Palestine and aligned with a solar eclipse. It beckons readers to re-evaluate what is perceived as immutable and to imagine pathways toward Utopia.

"Blood Orange"- the title an homage to the Yaffa Oranges (which were appropriated first by the British and subsequently by Israel) refers to the author themselves, their homeland and blood spilled in the name of settler colonialism.

This highly charged and cathartic body of work confronts the anguish and loss inflicted by genocide but also embraces a vision of a world free of it. The poems within "Blood Orange" were a means of working through and processing the grief caused by recent events and serve as an act of protest and defiance against settler colonialism as a whole.

From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia.

With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.