Always Coca-cola

From the novel's opening paragraph-"When my mother was pregnant with me, she had only one craving. That craving was for Coca-Cola"-first-time novelist Alexandra Chreiteh asks us to see, with wonder, humor, and dismay, how inextricably confused are naming and desire, identity and branding. Critics in Lebanon have responded to Chreiteh's frank novel in a storm, calling it "an electric shock" and finding that the problems of its characters reflect grave "social anomalies." Read Chreiteh and see what the storm is all about.

Alexandra Chreiteh is a Lebanese novelist, whose first novel Always Coca-Cola was translated into English and German. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University and also working on her third novel. Michelle Hartman is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill and a literary translator from Arabic and French into English. She has translated Arabic novels by Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib, Just Like a River, Iman Humaydan, Other Lives and Wild Mulberries, and Alexandra Chreiteh’s first novel, Always Coca-Cola. She has also translated a collection of Arabic and French language short stories by Lebanese authors, Beirut Noir.