Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Journalist Profile

Articles

A Guide to Emily Henry and Her Romance Books - The New York Times

5 days ago | nytimes.com | Joumana Khatib

Her best-selling romances have made her a new standard-bearer of the genre.
Is This Mysterious Swedish Commune an Eden or a Nightmare?

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Joumana Khatib

4 hours agoZizing 'Em Up: Avalanche, Lightning embracing all in mentality | NHL.comNHL.com staff writer Mike Zeisberger has been covering the NHL regularly since 1999.
Picture-Book Editions of Two Children's Stories by Clarice Lispector

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Joumana Khatib

Prickly, eccentric, endlessly complex - the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector (1920-77) has remained a bundle of contradictions years after her death. Lispector was idolized for her best-selling stories of emotional tumult and alienation; her glamorous appearance - she was famously compared to a "she-wolf" - and immensely private nature only added to the mystique.
2 Novels for People Who Really, Really Love Cats

2 months ago | news.nestia.com | Joumana Khatib

Image Credit...Ivan Alvarado/Reuters By Joumana KhatibDear readers,Every so often four French words come back to haunt me: “Elle connaît la vie.”They seem innocuous enough: “She knows life.” But what if I told you this phrase was written by none other than Colette, announcing that a cat had lost her virginity? ……
The Books Readers Loved in 2024

Dec 20, 2024 | nytimes.com | Joumana Khatib |Emma Lumeij

It is empathetic, odd, delicate, hysterical and quietly moving. Reading Adina's story of self-discovery stunned me. Everyone has felt odd or out of place at some point in their life. In fact, when I was a child I felt so strange and unlike anyone around me that I theorized I actually was an alien from another planet. Turns out, I was just gay. This has been a year of a lot of self-discovery and growing up. Reading "Beautyland" made me feel not alone in that.
'A History of the Big House,' by Charif Majdalani

Dec 2, 2024 | nytimes.com | Joumana Khatib

Most important, he constructs a grand estate and fills it with a chic Orthodox Christian wife, steadfast daughters and (mostly) upright sons. His loyal, seven-fingered right-hand man assumes a mythic quality, and in time, the Big House earns a reputation as a haven for men fleeing the Ottoman draft or simply locals in need of advice, a loan or both.
2 Novels About Complicated Nuns

Oct 26, 2024 | news.nestia.com | Joumana Khatib

Image Credit...Slawomir Kaminski/Agencja Gazeta via Reuters By Joumana KhatibDear readers,What a joy to begin this column from a place of abundance! Forbidding, austere, often terrifying, occasionallyecstaticabundance!I’m talking, of course, about nuns in literature. Though I come from a mixed-faith family, I have basically zero real-life experience with Catholicism and its servants. So my research for this newsletter has been eye-opening.
2 Books for a Real-Life ‘Brilliant Friend’

Sep 21, 2024 | news.nestia.com | Joumana Khatib

By Joumana KhatibDear readers,Very recently an old friend moved back to Brooklyn after nearly a decade in the South. ……
A French Punk Feminist Takes on #MeToo and Addiction

Sep 13, 2024 | nytimes.com | Joumana Khatib

DEAR DICKHEAD, by Virginie Despentes. Translated by Frank Wynne. For decades, the French author and filmmaker Virginie Despentes has courted aprecious, overlooked constituency: "the old hags, the dykes, the frigid," as she writes in "King Kong Theory," her expansive feminist manifesto, "all those girls who don't get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick."People like her, she suggests. Her characters are institutionalized, filmed during sex, addicts, bigots, cows in the abattoir.
Some Consider Being Biracial a 'Predicament.' Danzy Senna Thinks It's Hilarious.

Aug 31, 2024 | nytimes.com | Joumana Khatib

Long before Zendaya was our biggest young movie star, before the Kardashians became an aesthetic and economic juggernaut and certainly before Barack Obama (let alone Kamala Harris) ascended the political ranks, the novelist Danzy Senna predicted we'd soon be living through what she called the Mulatto Millennium. "Strange to wake up and realize you're in style. That's what happened to me just the other morning," she wrote in a 1998 essay.