Hasan Dudar: Carryout
Journalist Hasan Dudar presents his debut novel about a Palestinian refugee couple opening a restaurant in late-1970s America, in conversation with Eugenia Kim.
Why we picked this
A novel about Palestinian refugees building a life through food in late-Carter-era America — Dudar's journalism background shows in the specificity of place and period.
Hasan Dudar’s debut novel “Carryout” is set in the late 1970s, when a Palestinian refugee couple — displaced by conflict and bureaucracy — open a small restaurant in America and try to build something durable from scratch. The setting is particular: a specific moment of American immigrant experience, shaped by the political upheavals of the Middle East and the economic anxieties of that era. The restaurant becomes both livelihood and cultural artifact, a place where food carries the weight of home.
Dudar comes to fiction from journalism, and that lineage is evident in the novel’s texture — precise about geography, about the small negotiations of immigrant life, about how a community forms around a counter or a kitchen. The story is deeply human in its scale, but it sits inside a larger history that continues to resonate.
Eugenia Kim, herself an acclaimed novelist of the Korean-American experience, is an ideal conversation partner here. This is a free event at Politics and Prose, one of the few bookstores in the country where an author talking about displacement and belonging can expect a room that actually knows the context.