![]() It won the PEN Center Award for Literary Fiction and the American Book Award, and has been published in eight countries.Īgain using food as the fulcrum of her narrative, Abu-Jaber’s next book-the culinary memoir The Language of Baklava-chronicles her own experiences growing up in a food-obsessed Arab-American family. ![]() Her second novel, Crescent, inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello, is set in contemporary Los Angeles and focuses on a multicultural love story between an Iraqi exile and an Iraqi-American chef. Lush and lyrical, suffused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, Crescent is a sensuous love story as well as a gripping tale of commitment and risk. Jean Grant of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs wrote, “Abu-Jaber’s novel will probably do more to convince readers to abandon what media analyst Jack Shaheen calls America’s ‘abhorrence of the Arab’ than any number of speeches or publicity gambits.” Her first novel, Arabian Jazz-considered by many to be the first mainstream Arab-American novel-won the 1994 Oregon Book Award. ![]() The struggle to make sense of this sort of hybrid life, or “in-betweenness,” permeates Abu-Jaber’s fiction. Life was a constant juggling act, acting Arab at home but American in the street. ![]() When she was seven, her family moved to Jordan for two years, and she has lived between the US and Jordan ever since. ![]() Diana Abu-Jaber was born in Syracuse to an American mother and a Jordanian father. ![]()
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