Some of the News That’s Fit to Print

Adam Valen Levinson yearned to learn Arabic. He did and wrote about it in The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah: Fear and Love in the Modern Middle East. His publisher, W.W. Norton, successfully placed an excerpt in Literary Hub, the website widely known as LitHub. The excerpt ran on Dec. 7, 2017. It begins with Levinson—who died last November, seemingly a suicide— describing how he wanted to learn Arabic after the 9/11 terrorist attack, which was perpetrated by fundamentalists tied to the extremist group Al Qaeda.