Books for Arab American Heritage Month

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this “exuberant, defiant and introspective” memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America (The New York Times Book Review).

Timely, riveting, and unforgettable, The Other Americans is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.