André Aciman is the author of the novels Harvard Square (2013), Eight White Nights (2010), and Call Me by Your Name (2007), the memoir Out of Egypt (1995), and two books of essays. He is also the editor of The Proust Project (2004). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he directs the Writers’ Institute. Aciman lives with his wife and family in New York City.

-
Out of EgyptA Memoir
People in the street referred to her as al-tarsha, the deaf woman, and, among the Arabs in the marketplace, everyone and everything in her household was known in elation to the tarsha: the deaf woman’s father, the deaf woman’s home, her maid, her bicycle, her car, her husband. The motorcycle with which she had won an exhibition race on the Corniche in the early forties and which was later sold to a neighbor continued to be known as the tarsha’s mutusikl. When I was old enough to walk alone on the streets of Ibrahimieh, I discovered that I too was known as the tarsha’s son.
Out of Egypt:A Memoir -
Out of EgyptA Memoir
At five to nine that evening everyone moved into the smaller living room and crowded around the radio to listen to the news. Someone placed the small kerosene lamp on top of the radio.
The Egyptian news bulletin in French announced a decisive victory over the enemy. England, France, and Israel had been thoroughly defeated by the intrepid forces under the command of Colonel Nasser. The crushing march to Haifa and Tel Aviv was already under way, and by midnight of December 31, 1956, the combined Arab armies would celebrate their victory on the shores of Galilee.
“Claptrap!” muttered Uncle Isaac.
Out of Egypt:A Memoir -
Out of EgyptA Memoir
I was hit on my very first day at VC. I was slapped in arithmetic for not multiplying 6 times 8 correctly and got five strikes with a ruler in Arabic class for misreading five words in a five-word sentence. Everyone had laughed. Then I was punished for not finishing my rice and not knowing how to peel a fresh date with a knife and fork. I was made to stand next to the table while everyone else continued eating in the large dining hall. I wanted to take my grandfather’s Pelikan pen and thrust it into the forehead of Miss Sharif, my Arabic teacher, who sat at the head of the table.
Out of Egypt:A Memoir
“So candid, so penetrating and so beautifully written that it can make you feel cut open, emotionally exposed.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal [on Harvard Square]
"Aciman . . . has an ability to make the finest, the tiniest and most convincing distinctions between moods, responses, and registers. Everything is watched as it shifts and glitters and then hesitates and maybe is shadowed over . . . This really is fiction at its most supremely interesting; every clause and subclause shimmers with a densely observed and carefully rendered invention that seems oddly and delightfully precise and convincing . . . There are many layers and levels in this story." —Colm Tóibín, The New York Review of Books [on Call Me by Your Name]
“Psychologically charged, deeply Dostoyevskian . . . original to the core. Then again, Aciman has never failed to be original. Nor is he a stranger to questions of love.” —Marie Arana, The Washington Post [on Eight White Nights]
Selected Works

- Print Books
- Bookshop

- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Bookshop

- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Powell's
- Barnes & Noble
- E-Books
- Kobo
- Barnes & Noble
