the map of salt and stars by zeyn joukhadar

So seeing that exhibit for me sparked a lot of ideas about the people who had lived there and the lives that they had. It had this really rich history that I don't think a lot of people know about. I had vaguely heard of Little Syria, but even as a New Yorker, I didn't really know anything about this neighborhood, which was demolished in the 1940s to build the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. I already had been thinking about the idea that I wanted to talk about chosen family and about the history of the Arab American community. ZEYN JOUKHADAR: I actually saw an exhibit on Little Syria that was put on by the New York City Department of Records, and I think that it was really important for how I conceived of this book. SARAH NEILSON: What kind of research did you do for this book?

He spoke with Shondaland about history, corporeality, alternative masculinities, memory, and resistance. Joukhadar is a skilled storyteller whose prose is brimming with imagery. He currently lives in Italy with his partner. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Salon, and here on Shondaland, where he wrote a Pride Month essay about reclaiming queer and trans power. Zeyn Joukhadar is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI).

$27 at Barnes & Noble Credit: Atria Books

Along the way, he also reckons with what it means to be a transmasculine (generally someone assigned female at birth but who is more masculine than feminine) person in a patriarchal world. Latching onto his mother’s obsession with finding a rare, some say mythical, bird species and coping with grief by painting large murals on soon-to-be demolished buildings in gentrifying neighborhoods, the protagonist navigates his community - family both biological and chosen, a changing city, friends and neighbors - in his quest to get closer to the mysteries not only that his mother left behind, but within himself. The narrator, whose name is erased from the text for the bulk of the novel until he claims a truer one, is a closeted Syrian American trans boy living in New York City with his grandmother, following his mother’s mysterious death in a fire. In his sophomore novel, The Thirty Names of Night, Zeyn Joukhadar, whose debut novel, The Map of Salt and Stars, received critical acclaim in 2018, creates one of the most memorable and alluring characters of the year.

The map of salt and stars by zeyn joukhadar