Book Reading & Signing: Alia Malek's
A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories

AANM Library & Resource Center

Free; open to the public

Alia Malek (right) will read excerpts from her first book, A Country Called Amreeka; Arab Roots, American Stories (Free Press, 2009), with a book signing to follow.

Among the surfeit of narratives about Arabs that have been published in recent years, surprisingly little has been reported on Arabs in America — an increasingly relevant issue. 

This book is the most powerful approach imaginable: it is the story of the last forty-plus years of American history, told through the eyes of Arab Americans. It begins in 1963, before major federal legislative changes seismically transformed the course of American immigration forever. 

Each chapter describes an event in U.S. history — which may already be familiar to us — and invites us to live that moment in time in the skin of one Arab American. The chapters follow a timeline from 1963 to the present, and the characters live in every corner of this country.

These are dramatic narratives, describing the very human experiences of love, friendship, family, courage, hate, and success. There are the timeless tales of an immigrant community becoming American, the nostalgia for home, the alienation from a society sometimes as intolerant as its laws are generous. A Country Called Amreeka’s snapshots allow us the complexity of its characters’ lives with an impassioned narrative normally found in fiction.

Alia Malek is an author and civil rights lawyer. Born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, she began her legal career as a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. After working in the legal field in the U.S., Lebanon, and the West Bank, Malek, who has degrees from Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, earned her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Her reportage has appeared in Salon, The Columbia Journalism Review, and The New York Times. A Country Called Amreeka is her first book.