May 2017
Photo © Beowulf Sheehan.
Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review. She resides in Brooklyn with her husband.
Her poetry collection, Atrium, was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, while her latest collection, Hijira, was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and published by Southern Illinois University Press.
What are you reading? What's on your nightstand?
I’m finally reading “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell (I’ve been meaning to get to it for ages) and “At Night We Walk in Circles” by Daniel Alarcón is up next.
Where do you go to get inspired?
For whatever reason, airports always make me want to write.
What's something that surprised you recently (in a good way)?
Being asked to write a letter of recommendation by a writer I hugely admire.
Where do you write?
Everywhere: my office, on the rug in my living room, subways, in the park.
What/who makes you laugh? Why?
When children curse. I know I shouldn’t laugh, because it’s reinforcing that behavior, but the younger they are, the more I can’t help it.
Favorite fictional character ever?
The Little Prince.
What do you want readers to know about you and your books?
That I love nothing more on this planet than writing a story, even when the process is making me miserable.
What are you working on?
"Verdict: This timely historical does for the Palestinians what Khaled Hosseini did for the people of Afghanistan. By placing readers inside the hearts and minds of one Arab family scattered from Paris to Boston to Lebanon, she beautifully illustrates the resilience of the human spirit."
—Library Journal
"Salt Houses illuminates the heartache and permanent unsettledness experienced by refugees all over the world, reminding readers of the burdens and the blessings of home."
—Bustle.com, "15 New Authors You're Going to Be Obsessed With This Year"
"It's not always easy to follow Alyan's complex geographic and emotional mapping, but this journey is well worth taking. A deeply moving look inside the Palestinian diaspora."
—Kirkus Review
"The war may have only lasted six days, but its impact echoes through generations of a Palestinian family in this ambitious debut novel...This is a moving story about a family's battle to salvage what remains when their home is taken away."
—Booklist
"Alyan blends joy with pain, frustration with elation, longing with boredom in this beautiful debut novel filled with the panoply of life. The frontispiece tells the whole story in microcosm with a family tree of the Palestinian Yacoub family, who, for most of the book, no longer lives in Palestine...These lives full of promise and loss will feel familiar to any reader; Alyan's excellent storytelling and deft handling of the complex relationships ensures that readers will not soon forget the Yacoub family."
—Publishers Weekly
Salt Houses by
"Reading Salt Houses is like having your coffee grounds read: cosmic, foreboding and titillating all at once. In this magnificent debut, Alyan's powerful and poetic voice guides us into the dark recesses of history and leads us right up to the present tensions between East & West, the modern & ancestral, the hopeless and the hopeful." --Aline Ohanesian, author of Orhan's Inheritance On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia's brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can't escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia's children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand--one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again.
