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The Good Arabs

$9.99$17.95

Available in paperback, EPUB, and PDF

by Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch

Fall 2021

Winner of Grand Prix du livre de Montréal
The Globe 100: The books we loved in 2021
Arab American Book Award, Honorable Mention
Khayrallah Prize, Honorable Mention
Blue Met New Contribution Award, Finalist

Oscillating between post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.

The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.

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Author: Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch

ISBN: 781999058890 (print)

ISBN: 9781777485207 (EPUB)

ISBN: 9781998898121 (PDF)

Cover art by Lee Lai

Cover design by LOKI

  • Paperback, 120 pages
  • Printed in Quebec
  • Publication date: September 21, 2021

“Original and fascinating in its design, this unclassifiable book written between poetry, narrative and conversations thinks our relationship to the world between private and political. The hybrid invents new spaces away from unique roots, between real and poetic space.”
—Carole David, Grand Prix du livre jury chair

“Reading El Bechelany-Lynch, you are reminded to come with tenderness to the work of ordinary things so that something larger and more lasting can begin.”
—Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

“Everything about The Good Arabs is open-ended, curious, trying. El Bechelany-Lynch constructs a freeing poetic atmosphere, in which central concerns regarding spaces, family, tragedy, inheritance, and gender are swelling in the heat of each room.”
—Emily Mernin, Montreal Review of Books

“Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch’s The Good Arabs is a map of what it means to be queer, to be trans, to be Arab: from the hope of revolution to the Lebanese garbage crisis, of whiteness and its weight, of public space and private space and of eating pumpkin seeds on a summer balcony when the power is out. Even at its heaviest, this is a collection that insists on joy and on embodiment, reminding us that resistance can look like shaking one’s hips to Nancy Ajram, too.”
—Zeyn Joukhadar, author of The Thirty Names of Night

 

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EPUB, PDF, Print

Availability

Print books available for purchase to addresses in Canada and the United States. EPUBs and PDFs available worldwide.