During this exceptionally turbulent time, the Middle East was convulsed by the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, civil war, regime breakdown, state collapse, proxy wars, and refugee flight.

Yet it falls to fiction to truly capture life in the Middle East over the last 100 years. Munif’s evocative novel, for example, first published in Lebanon in 1984, recounts the devastating encounter ...

Saeb Eigner’s ambitious, timely overview of Middle Eastern art from 1900 to today features more than 250 prominent and lesser-known artists, spanning Morocco in North Africa to Iran in the East.

This overhaul, years in the making, is taking the clearest shape right now in the Middle East, a region where the U.S. has devoted many resources in the 21st century.