If You’re in NYC: The Launch of Najla Said’s ‘Looking for Palestine’

Yes, that Said:

Actress and playwright Najla Said — daughter of world-renowned critic and theorist Edward Said — is launching a new memoir. The book, Looking for Palestine, was adapted in part from Said’s one-woman show, “Palestine,” which debuted off-Broadway in the summer of 2010.

Said will be holding a reading and signing of the new book, now out from Penguin, at BookCourt in Brooklyn on Friday, August 2 at 7 p.m. According to Penguin, she’ll also be at the Barnes & Noble on theUpper West Side (82^nd & Broadway) on Monday, August 5 at 7 p.m.

About the process of getting this book down on paper, Said told Salon:

Well, really the play sort of evolved from what was literally a journal entry that was made into a theater piece that was 15 minutes that I did at a high school in New York in 2005. From that, I was encouraged to develop it into a play, and I worked on the play for many years and did lots of developmental readings and it kept growing and growing. I did the run of the play, and it was pretty successful, but such is the medium of theater that it doesn’t reach many people. So even though I’d been touring at schools and stuff, I think there were a lot of people who were interested in getting a more comprehensive written version of it, ‘cause I can’t travel the world all the time.

Read:

Salon – Najla Said: “My Arab-American story is not typical in any way”

The National – In memoir, New Yorker comes full circle in embracing Arab identity

RSVP:

The Facebook event for Said’s BookCourt reading