Diana Abu-Jaber

Lena is a fingerprint expert at a crime lab in the small city of Syracuse, New York, where winters are cold and deep. Suddenly, a series of crib deaths--indistinguishable from SIDS except for the fevered testimony of one distraught mother with connections in high places--draws the attention of the police and the national media and raises the possibility of the inconceivable: could there be a serial infant murderer on the loose? Orphaned as a child,

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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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It's 1960. In a small logging town called Calamus that's about as far in the middle of nowhere as you can get, Wade Curren, star of the high school baseball and football teams, is content living out his role of local hero, holding court in the corner booth of the town diner where his girlfriend Lorna waits tables. Lorna, working to support her family, is plotting her escape from their small town. Fiercely independent and an avid reader of the kinds...

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...