National Book Award finalist Rabih Alameddine’s “beautiful and absorbing” (New York Times) novel An Unnecessary Woman garnered universal acclaim following his best-selling exuberant epic The Hakawati, an Arabian Nights for this century. In his newest novel, The Angel of History, an acerbic and intelligent Yemeni-born poet narrates a tumultuous life story over the course of one night in a psychiatric clinic’s waiting room. Alameddine is also the author of Koolaids; I, the Divine; and The Perv. He divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut. The Some Favorite Writers series is sponsored by the UCLA Department of English and Friends of English, and organized by Mona Simpson.