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February 23rd, 2021 
Awake Goy 
We’re excited to announce our first book club event! A live reading with author Zaina Arafat followed by a Q&A about her debut novel and our February book club pick “You Exist Too Much.”
You won’t want to miss this unique opportunity to connect with other book club members and meet Zaina. We’ll kick off the event on Thursday March 4, at 6:00 pm EST over Zoom. The event is free, but you must register in advance here!
Want to talk directly to Zaina during the event? Email us your questions at [email protected] and we may bring you into the Zoom!
Zaina is an LGBTQ Arab/Muslim-American fiction and nonfiction writer. Her novel “You Exist Too Much,” was selected as a most anticipated book for 2020 by O, the Oprah Magazine, Good Morning America, Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar.
Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, the Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR.
Read an exclusive excerpt of the book here on our website here.
Book Club members can pick up a copy of “You Exist Too Much” from Middle East Books and More with a 10% discount by entering the promo code BookClub at checkout.
We are pleased to announce at this time that for the remainder of the book club series, Middle East Books and More as our exclusive merchant partner. Book club member will be able to get reduce prices on purchases and support an independent book store. Middle East Books and More is a project of the American Educational Trust, a non-profit, non-partisan organization incorporated in 1982 in Washington, DC by retired U.S. Foreign Service Officers.
Read more about “You Exist Too Much” from Catapult:
“On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.
Told in vignettes that flash between the United States and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.”
You can register for the live event on Thursday March 4, 2021 at 6 p.m. here!
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