Zayed University Middle East Film Festival

www.ZUMEFF.com

Zayed University does it again! Last year in a class at Zayed University Abu Dhabi and student project created a film festival for shorts. Instead of the project going on the shelf it has become a regular feature of Zayed University. 15 students and 2 faculty have pulled together an amazing collection of short films from the region and they have pulled off another film festival. WOW, listen to the piece and go visit the site and see a film or 2!

Alia Yunis' 'The Night Counter'

Alia Yunis joined us on the phone, www.aliayunis.com,to talk about her debut smash hit book 'The Night Counter'.

The Book
Audio Read an Excerpt Reading Group Guide

An enchanting debut that asks, Which stories would you tell, if you only had nine days left to tell them?

Fatima Abdullah has been alive 85 long years, and she knows when her time will come. In fact, it should come just nine days from tonight, the 992nd nightly visit of the beautiful and immortal Scheherazade.

Each night, Fatima has told Scheherazade her life stories, all the while knowing that on the 1001st night, her storytelling will end forever. But between tonight and night 1001, Fatima has a few loose ends to tie up. She must find a wife for her openly gay grandson, teach Arabic (and birth control) to her 17-year-old great-granddaughter, make amends with her estranged husband, and decide which of her troublesome children should inherit her family's home in Lebanon--a house she herself has not seen in nearly 70 years. All this while under the surveillance of two bumbling FBI agents eager to uncover Al Qaeda in L.A.

In a debut that charms and bewitches, Alia Yunis unravels four generations of Abdullah family secrets with a great sense of comic timing and a deft touch of magical realism. Touching on the histories of both the United States and the Middle East over the last one hundred years, this is the heart-warming story of a family just as crazy as yours.