Laila Lalami is the author of four novels, including The Moor’s Account, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and The Other Americans, a National Book Award finalist. Her most recent book, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, is a work of nonfiction. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Tidy stories reducing the atrocity to a clash of civilizations or a problem with integration are neither enlightening nor satisfying.
The Childhood of Jesus explores the fictitious dimensions of a just and compassionate world.
Joseph Anton is a tale of betrayals: of free speech, communities, religion, marriages, personal convictions, friends.
Assailed by the right as a fiction, anti-Muslim bias is all too real for those who live with it.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a superb, empathic account of life in a Mumbai undercity.
In Assumption a murder mystery becomes a lesson in how much we do not know.
The king says his realm is a beacon of liberalism, but the people demand bread, and roses too.
What the debate over terrorists seems to miss is the personal dimension: personal failures and personal grievances of the lone gunmen.
The young people protesting in Arab capitals right now want a meaningful break with the status quo and, in many ways, that means a break from American support.
A Moroccan single mother has earned the sad distinction of being the first Arab woman to commit political self-immolation.