RABIH ALAMEDDINE
Friday, May 16 at 7:30 p.m.

Co-presented with the ARAB CENTER OF WASHINGTON. This is one many have been waiting for. Junot Diaz ("Here is absolute beauty. One of the finest novels I've read in years"), Amy Tan, Aleksandar Hemon, Robert Olen Butler, Dorothy Allison, and Jonathan Safran Foer are among those voicing ardent praise for Beirut-born novelist Rabih Alameddine and his spell-binding novel, The Hakawati (Knopf). "Stories descend from stories as families descend from families in the magical third novel from Alameddine, telling tales of contemporary Lebanon that converge, ingeniously, with timeless Arabic fables. With his father dying in a Beirut hospital, Osama al-Khattar, a Los Angeles software engineer, returns in 2003 for the feast of Eid al-Hada. As he keeps watch with his sister, Lina, and extended family, Osama narrates the family history, going back to his great-grandparents, and including his grandfather, a hakawati, or storyteller ... Alameddine's own storytelling ingenuity seems infinite: out of it he has fashioned a novel on a royal scale, as reflective of past empires as present." – Publishers Weekly. "Here it comes, the book of the year, on its own magic carpet. No book this bewitching ever felt so important; no book this important has ever been so lovingly enchanted. It is a snapshot of our current crisis, and a story for the ages." – Andrew Sean Greer. This is one not to be missed.

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