New fiction, New Ohio Review

Writing a novel requires deleting a lot of it. The first story I ever had published—in Crab Orchard Review in 2006—was a castoff from the protean version of The Skin and Its Girl (forthcoming from Ballantine in 2023). When I returned to the abandoned project in 2018, I spent a lot of time trying to gauge how my understanding of my old characters had changed, and how my new understanding of the story changed the way I wrote about them.

Saeeda, my narrator’s grandmother, remarried after her first husband passed away. Most of the characters in the book don’t like her new husband, “an American who’d changed his good Arabic name of Khalil to Kelly,” and we don’t get to hear much about him. But as I worked through his relationship with Saeeda, I wrote this chapter that ultimately never found a place in the manuscript.

“Abu Hani’s Middle Eastern Foods and Gifts” traces a delicate friendship between two men who’d once been on opposite sides of the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine. It feels weird to celebrate a publication right now, alongside posts about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the million displaced Ukrainians. But I wrote this story while thinking through issues that aren’t unrelated: the complexities of forgiveness, the dangers of assigning blame, and the work of finding small islands of peace.

You can get a copy here. I want to thank Dave Wanczyk and all the staff of New Ohio Review who read the story and provided edits; Candace Walsh for encouraging me to submit the manuscript in the first place; and my friends and peers in the Warren Wilson MFA workshop who provided thoughtful responses and suggestions. It’s an honor to see my words in print alongside so many other talented writers and poets.