Our Arab

On Longing, Belonging, and Hope

Coming Soon

Contributors

By Zaina Arafat

Read by Zaina Arafat

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Sep 29, 2026
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781668659359

Price

$24.99

Format

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.

  • "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 the author of Our Arab and the debut novel You Exist Too Much, winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, The Believer, Vice, and BuzzFeed. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives with her family in New York.

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