News

I spoke to Lulu Garcia-Navarro on NPR’s Weekend Edition about my new novel, writing from different perspectives, and the diversity of immigrant experiences. You can listen to the interview here:

The Guardian‘s Hadley Freeman profiled me for the paper, ahead of the release of my new book in the UK. Here’s a taste:

This feeling of separateness – of being, as she puts it, “the person in the corner observing everything but who no one pays attention to” – would become a running theme in her life. Despite being working class, her parents sent her to a French-speaking school, usually the choice of upper-class families, “so that was another feeling of, you’re in here but not of us,” she says. Lalami grew up speaking Arabic at home, French at school and, eventually, English at work, and this flowing between different languages taught her that the usual barriers between people are more porous than most assume.

You can read the rest here. Early reviews of The Other Americans in the UK have appeared in the Times and The Economist.

The Other Americans is out! The book launch party was at Diesel Bookstore in Brentwood, where I was in conversation with the brilliant David Ulin. It was wonderful to finally share the book with readers after being alone with it for so long!

Early reviews have appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and Entertainment Weekly. I’m also thrilled to report that Esquire and the WSJ picked it as one of their best books for spring.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be visiting Boston, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. You can find details about the first leg of my book tour on my events page.

This interview was great fun: I talked to the New York Times book Review‘s By the Book about my reading habits.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night?

Paper only. Books give me an intimacy that e-readers can’t deliver. I love the heft of a good novel in my hands, the smell of new pages, the fact that I can underline a beautiful sentence or mark an unusual detail. I interact with a paper book in many different ways; I’ve been known to throw a book across the room when it frustrates or angers me, for example. And books hold so many memories of the times and places in which I’ve read them. The other day, I opened a novel, and a bookmark that my daughter made me when she was 4 years old fell out. No e-reader can do that.

You can read the rest here.