Friendly jordie coronation

The National Book finalists were announced last month, and on the shortlist for fiction is Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel An Unnecessary Woman. In the lead-up to the announcement of the winners next week, we’re revisiting a conversation with Alameddine when he spoke at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in January.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of Koolaids, I, the Divine, The Perv, and the international bestseller The Hakawati, an ambitious re-telling of the Arabian Nights in 21st-century Beirut which was described by the New York Times as “a wonder of a book… genius.”

This is the short version of the bio. The long version involves a life as an engineer, a painter, and a writer whose humor and experimental prose crackles with exuberantly pensive characters who at times seem to be masters of their own fate, most visibly through the varied forms of their stories as fragments, first chapters, myths, and musings.

Rabih Alameddine’s latest book, An Unnecessary Woman, born into the English speak

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