Lebanon is an Arab country that faces west. The Lebanese embrace Western institutions—i.e., European café culture, American retail brands—but Lebanon remains within the Arab world. When not dominated by its powerful neighbors, Lebanon’s bourgeois middle class flourishes. This makes cosmopolitan Beirut a most interesting hybrid: a westernized Arab city. It’s against this backdrop that Alexandra Chreitah and Michelle Hartman write Always Coca-Cola, a lightly sketched novella about young women in contemporary Lebanon.
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