Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian American writer and the author of the novel You Exist Too Much, an Indie Next Pick. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including Granta, The New York Times, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, VICE, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and NPR. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and was awarded the 2018 Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship from Jack Jones Literary Arts. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
An excerpt of the novel by Zaina ArafatJune 5, 2020
I winced with fear and a fleeting disgust. A relationship with a woman meant failure: I had failed to get a man, failed to find something normal, failed to not be pathetic.