Rabih Alameddine

Born in Amman, the novelist Rabih Alameddine grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon before moving to California to attend college. His books include Koolaids, The Hakawati, An Unnecessary Woman, and The Wrong End of the Telescope. “The truth is it is rare to find a human being fully before us that you can't fall in love with,” he said in a 2014 interview. “You might want to kill them at times, you might want to smack them and throw them off the roof, but it’s also a love affair. And that's what, in my opinion, a good novel does.”