A caucasian woman with long blond hair, wearing a black sweater. Behind her is a lake, clear sky, and distant trees.

Alexandra Chreiteh

Somerville, MA

Alexandra Chreiteh is a Lebanese novelist and academic known for her queer, feminist work and interest in margins and borderlands. She is the author of two novels in Arabic, Always Coca-Cola and Ali and his Russian Mother. Her work has been translated to English, German, and French. In addition to her creative work, she received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale in 2016 and is currently Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor International Literary and Visual Studies at Tufts University. Her academic monograph is tentatively titled Other Realisms: a Theory of the Arabic Fantastic.

Photo: Sharon Shahanny El Asri

Sweetmeats or, Who Killed Issam Sukkar?


Alexandra Chreiteh is a Lebanese novelist and academic known for her queer, feminist work and interest in margins and borderlands.

Artist Bio

Sweetmeats or, Who Killed Issam Sukkar? is a novel and fiction podcast in Arabic, set in a border town between Lebanon and Syria, on the cusp of the Syrian revolution. As the protests unravel into armed warfare, an elderly wedding singer finds a mysterious body hidden in her sister’s basement. When Nafiseh takes it upon herself to dispose of the body, her fate is intertwined with that of a transgender migrant and an indentured domestic worker from Ethiopia. The novel follows the perspectives of several of its characters, probing the relationships between gender and labor, global migration and ecological disaster, mounting nationalism, and domestic violence.


Award Year
2022
Status

In Progress