On Sale: Sep 29, 2026
Page Count: 320 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13: 9780316584708

$14.99

$19.99 CAD

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A poignant, moving essay collection on the longing and hope of living in diaspora and what it means to be Palestinian today, from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of You Exist Too Much.

Of the many Palestinian Americans in the diaspora, few have direct experiences or memories of their ancestral land, if any at all. So how does one maintain a connection to a home so volatile, ever-shrinking, and nearly unattainable? And how does a child of diaspora raise a child of diaspora, at a time when Palestinians throughout the world—particularly those living in their homeland—are vulnerable to massive violence?

Our Arab is Zaina Arafat's highly anticipated follow-up to her critically acclaimed novel You Exist Too Much, with essays that coalesce around the fundamental characteristic of living in diaspora, the state of longing: longing to be elsewhere, longing to return home, and longing to know what home is. This is a book that holds many truths at once about society, identity, and family, filled with flashes of radical compassion and anger and forming an incredibly complex portrait of what it means to be Palestinian today.

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Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020. Arafat's stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub, and NPR. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. Arafat teaches writing at Barnard College, The School of the New York Times, and Long Island University Post, and has led workshops for dreamers and DACA recipients through the Writer's Guild Initiative. Arafat holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an M.A. from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

"Our Arab is a stunning collection of interconnected essays by Zaina Arafat, written in prose—at once sharp and deeply lyrical—that traces the contours of diasporic longing. Moving fluidly through questions of identity, inheritance, and motherhood, these essays speak to the quiet negotiations of belonging that shape mothering, love, creative practice between places. Beautifully written and bracingly honest, Our Arab is a meditation on displacement, memory, and the fragile, enduring work of making a life."
Hala Alyan, poet and author of Salt Houses and I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

Zaina Arafat

About the Author

Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay’s favorite book of 2020. Arafat’s stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub, and NPR. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. Arafat teaches writing at Barnard College, The School of the New York Times, and Long Island University Post, and has led workshops for dreamers and DACA recipients through the Writer’s Guild Initiative. Arafat holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an M.A. from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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