Rabih Alameddine

A writer of blinding talent and immense imaginative powers, Rabih Alameddine is known for working miracles with words on the page, bending genres, and playing with form, all the while holding firm to the essential aim of fiction: to tell a good story. And tell a good story he does—his novels and short fiction have him swinging from San Francisco to Beirut, from biblical times to the modern day, exploring issues ranging from the AIDS epidemic to the Lebanese civil war. He has won the respect of writers such as Amy Tan, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Dí­az. His fiction is informed by his incredibly diverse background (he was born in Jordan and raised in Kuwait and Lebanon) and interests: Alameddine is a painter as well as a writer, holds an MBA and a graduate degree in engineering, loves both UCLA basketball and obscure literary tomes, and now divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut. He is, one might say, a renaissance man for this age.

For all the life experience he brings to the page, Alameddine does not condone didacticism in literature. None of his books are "commentary" on a culture or a people, and he has no interest in "educating" the reader. And yet, many have remarked that it is hard not to learn something—or a great many things—from reading Alameddine's work. By sharing with us fundamental and surprising truths about individual characters he paints on the page, Alameddine shatters stereotypes and opens our eyes to beautiful and painful contradictions that exist around us. In her review of Alameddine's novel The Hakawati, Lorraine Adams wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "in an era when almost all we seem to see of the Middle East is terrorism, it's bracing to come upon a work—and a world—that expands our narrow vision, transforming it to one of multiplicity, enchanting it with hope."

Alameddine is the author of three novels and one collection of short stories. The Hakawati is his most recent novel. Published in May 2008, it became a word-of-mouth must-read for fans of literary fiction, and gained praise from critics all over. In the Boston Globe, Julie Wittes Schlack wrote:

The power of words artfully strung together—to woo, to arouse, to insult, to enchant, and to deceive—is evident on [the novel's] every page. . . . In the best tradition of magical realism, [Alameddine's] tales commingle the fabulous with the mundane, the grandiose with laugh-out-loud wit. Woven into this colorful cloth of fable and myth are threads of the history of Armenians and Turks, Sunnis and Shiites, Syrians and Lebanese, Palestinians and Falangists.

Prior to The Hakawati, Alameddine authored I, the Divine, a novel comprised entirely of first chapters, The Perv, a collection of short stories that explored relationships ranging from that of a father and son to that of a pedophile and a twelve-year-old boy, and Koolaids, subtitled The Art of War and about, among other things, AIDS and the civil war in Lebanon.

Alameddine's wit and facility with words, his diverse body of knowledge and powerful intellect, and his life, profoundly shaped by time spent in a conflicted Beirut and watching the AIDS epidemic unfold in San Francisco, will make a strong impression on audiences. Those who are looking for an off-beat evening that blends the serious with the funny and the ancient with the modern, and that challenges their expectations and assumptions about the world around us, will not be disappointed by this master storyteller.

Works by this Speaker

The Hakawati

In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. As the family gathers, stories begin to unfold: Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching tales are interwoven with classic stories of the Middle East. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the beautiful Fatima; Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders; and a host of mischievous imps. Through Osama, we also enter the world of the contemporary Lebanese men and women whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war, conflicted identity, and survival. With The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century.

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I, the Divine

Named by her grandfather after the ’’divine’’ Sarah Bernhardt, red-haired Sarah Nour El-Din is feisty, rebellious, individualisticâ€"a person determined to make of her life a work of art. In I, the Divine, she tries to tell her story, sometimes casting it as a memoir, sometimes a novel, full of sly humor and dark realism, always beguilingly incomplete. What emerges from these exquisite ’’first chapters’’ is extraordinaryâ€"a woman and a life as real as any we have known in literature. Raised in a hybrid family shaped by divorce and remarriage, and by Beirut in wartime, Sarah finds a fragile peace in self-imposed exile in the United States. Her vibrant spirit has survived violence, her mother’s suicide, her sister’s madness, and the impossibility of escaping her family (including her frighteningly entrepreneurial stepmother, who has hired members of Hezbollah to sabotage her competitors). Her extraordinary dignity is supported by a best friend, a grown-up son, sensual pleasures (occasional sex, frequent bubble baths, the company of cats), and her determination to tell her own story.

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The Perv

Following the publication of his critically acclaimed first novel, Koolaids, Rabih Alameddine offers a collection of stories that explores the experience of a number of Lebanese charactersâ€"men and women, gay and straightâ€"whose lives have been blown apart by a disastrous civil war and the resulting international diaspora. Daring in style as well as content, these tales explore the relationships that anchor our hearts to the worldâ€"father and son, grandson and grandmother, pedophile and 12-year-old boy, young man and woman of the streets, sister and sister, daughter and father, gay man and heterosexual, the quick and their dead.

Suffused by a yearning for what has been lost, these narratives are both experimental and traditional, humorous and disturbing, and confirm without doubt that Alemeddine is one of the most original and accomplished young writers to emerge in some time.

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Koolaids

An extraordinary literary debut, this book is about the AIDS epidemic, the civil war in Beirut, death, sex, and the meaning of life. Daring in form as well as content, Koolaids turns the traditional novel inside out and hangs it on the clothesline to air.

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