{"product_id":"the-coin-a-novel","title":"The Coin: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eBy Yasmin Zaher. A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut America is stifling her--her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging--all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"[A] smart, sneering novel of capital and its consequences . . . In a spiraling, hallucinogenic plot, The Coin draws a dotted line between the narrator's grandmother's garden in Palestine and a splatter of excrement on New York City subway tiles; between her grandfather's birthplace of Bisan--'now a low-income town in Israel, housing mostly Jewish families from Morocco and no Palestinians'--Stokely Carmichael and a Gucci window display appropriating the language of revolution . . . The whiplash feels intentional, funny in an absurdist way, like the narrator's existential seesawing between jaded American consumerism and the sadness and guilt of displacement . . . The novel's power is not in cohesion, but in chaos.\" --Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. The Coin is her first novel.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYear: 2024\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHardcover\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Middle East Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52506380271832,"sku":null,"price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0807\/5201\/7624\/files\/the-coin-a-novel-p1.jpg?v=1789910474","url":"https:\/\/houseofmena.com\/products\/the-coin-a-novel","provider":"House of Mena","version":"1.0","type":"link"}