Diana Abu-Jaber

"A full-course meal, a rich, complex and memorable story that will leave you lingering gratefully at [Abu-Jaber's] table."-Ron Charles, Washington Post At thirteen, Felice Muir ran away from home to punish herself for some horrible thing she had done-leaving a hole in the hearts of her pastry-chef mother, her real estate attorney father, and her foodie-entrepreneurial brother. After five years of scrounging for food, drugs, and shelter on Miami Beach,...

Diana Abu-Jaber’s vibrant, humorous memoir weaves together delicious food memories that illuminate the two cultures of her childhood—American and Jordanian. Here are stories of being raised by a food-obsessed Jordanian father and tales of Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts and goat stew feasts under Bedouin tents in the desert. These sensuously evoked repasts, complete with recipes, paint a loving and complex portrait of Diana’s

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"This oracular first novel, which unfurls like gossamer [has] characters of a depth seldom found in a debut." -The New Yorker In Diana Abu-Jaber's "impressive, entertaining" (Chicago Tribune) first novel, a small, poor-white community in upstate New York becomes home to the transplanted Jordanian family of Matussem Ramoud: his grown daughters, Jemorah and Melvina; his sister Fatima; and her husband, Zaeed. The widower Matuseem loves American jazz,...

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.

Pauline Kaldas is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Hollins University. She was born in Egypt and immigrated to the United States in 1969. She is the author of Letters from Cairo and Egyptian Compass. Khaled Mattawa, a 2014 MacArthur fellow, is associate professor Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was born in Libya and immigrated to the United States in 1979. He is the author...