Hasan Dudar’s Carryout is a marrow-deep collection of linked stories rooted in the Arab diaspora, with themes of displacement and identity, as well as threads of melancholy and humor. Out now from the University of Iowa Press, the book follows Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, and his wife Salma, a Lebanese refugee who escaped the war in Beirut, as they set roots in Toledo, Ohio. The displaced couple open a carryout, a corner store, from which they carve out a living. They have three children: eldest son Mustafa, only daughter Nawal, and youngest son, Walid — an aspiring poet.
With great lucidity and wit, Dudar brings readers a vivid portrait of immigrants and refugees who have no other choice but to create a new community for themselves in the United States. Carryout is poignant and tender — a mosaic of life experiences and the complex inner monologues of characters who are grappling with the complicated legacy that is displacement.
I spoke with Dudar about the inspiration behind Carryout, the complexities of the corner store, and major themes embedded in his debut.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.
Amaris Castillo: Congratulations on Carryout. This book is about the Idilbis, a Palestinian-Lebanese family carving out lives in Toledo, Ohio. We meet Ziad and his wife, Salma, a Lebanese refugee from Beirut. And then we meet their three children, each grappling with their own journeys. What was the seed of this book?
Hasan Dudar: I was away from home for the first time, in a way that felt lasting. I had gone to California and found myself strangely really missing Ohio and really missing Toledo. I missed the landscape, which most people thought of as flat and gray and uninteresting. But somehow, when I was away from it, that started to mean something to me. I started to see a lot of the small beauty of the place that I grew up in. I started to miss my family, of course, my friends and community. You really start to see what you left behind. What I had left behind was something that’s hard to replicate: this really tight-knit community of immigrants. My father and most of his extended family live in that area. They all came over. Through that, there was this really vibrant community of refugees, of immigrants, of people somewhat in exile, but also strangely at home. They had formed something that felt very sincere and warm and full of life. I started to see it in a way that I hadn’t really seen before. Maybe I’d always seen it that way, but when you’re removed from it, you start to have these revelations of what it was. So it started from that seed of missing the place, yearning for it, and knowing that it can’t be replicated.
I wanted to recreate what it meant to me, what it meant to others. I was trying to preserve that feeling of what it was like to grow up in a certain place, at a certain time, and that’s really Toledo in the 90s and the early 2000s, in a community of immigrants — Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, Lebanese, and the broader community, too.
AC: Let’s talk about the family business — their carryout. The store, at times, felt like its own character in the book. In one chapter, Abu Sinno — an old friend of Ziad’s father — calls it a cage. What symbolism, if any, does the corner store hold for your characters?
HD: That’s a great question. I had always wanted to write about a corner store, a carryout. I find them to be interesting places. I grew up in one; it was like a second home to us. That sort of setting and what you come across has left a lasting impact on me. I intuitively wanted to write about it. And when you’re done with writing, you start to really have the time to reflect back on, ‘What does that all mean?’ and ‘Why did the book take the shape that it took?’
What I started to realize was that a carryout is a place of longing and a bit of melancholy. There’s also a tension of power and powerlessness in it, which is that you’re a merchant. You have a business, and you have some stake in that community. People come to you for many things, and it’s a lifeline in a lot of ways, whether that’s to get groceries or as a social lifeline. People come there to chat, to let off steam, to gossip. But you’re also at the mercy of the outside world. How much more can you do? You fill the store with things, and you wait and hope people will show up. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t for a variety of reasons. I just thought that it encapsulated a lot of things. It encapsulated that kind of precarity of life in general, and life as an immigrant here. You come, you hope for the best, and you can’t control the outcome. And I think that that’s life in a carryout.
AC: I understand that your own family had a convenience store. What was your relationship like to the store?
HD: It was mixed. I feel like my parents were always stressed about it — seven days a week. When I was young, they had really long hours at the store. Then as we got older, they started to close it earlier. Our life revolved around it and, when your life revolves around something like that, it’s a source of a lot of stress. We spent our summers there, our weekends there, a lot of time off there. We worked hand in hand with our parents. So the carryout had this kind of homey feeling, because so much of our life happened there. We didn’t always get the typical summer break that other kids got. But somehow, even when I was in it, I kind of always loved it — because I love people. I love listening to people’s stories and watching how people interact with each other. It (the store) came with its issues. But for a kid who loved all the eccentricity of life and people as they are, it was a dream. It was a gift. People came in and were totally themselves. They were hilarious and full of stories.
You also get to watch your parents work, which I don’t think a lot of people get to experience in life. You’re there, and you get to see another side of your parents and how they interact with people — how they deal with problems. That helps to reveal, in a lot of ways, who they are. So you learn a lot more about your parents than you otherwise would.
AC: As I read your book, I felt strong undercurrents of two major themes: identity and the true meaning of home. They intertwined often. While writing this book, can you share how you planned to approach these themes on the page?
HD: Those are big questions and, in order to write it and have the wherewithal to keep pushing through, I wanted to simplify things. I was really focused on what felt true to the characters, what felt true to a paragraph, a page, on the sentence level. That was what I was mainly focusing on, was sentence-by-sentence, and ‘What next?’ When you write, there are certainly questions floating in your mind, whether you realize it or not as a writer. You’re writing for a variety of reasons and, a lot of times, you don’t know those reasons. But you’re putting something on the page. You’re trying to say something. You’re trying to create something.
For me, those probably are the lingering questions among them: The question of home and identity. I was always drawn to this time and community that formed in Toledo among the Arab immigrants, Muslim immigrants — particularly the Palestinians and Lebanese — and how they formed such a tight-knit community that held onto identity, but was also able to be part of the world around them. It was so effortless and genuine and sincere. So I was just really drawn to figuring that out. How did these people leave everything behind and come here? They seem so at ease with who they are. There’s definitely a lot of mournfulness for what they lost, and wanting to go back. But there’s this kind of existential abandon, I felt, in them, which was, ‘Well, we’re here. We have to do what we have to do, and that’s to create something new out of this.’ That really inspired me.
AC: There is also a big theme of displacement, which you’ve alluded to already. Displacement can be from one day to the next — you’re displaced. Or it could be a slow process over time. What message were you hoping to send about displacement in Carryout?
HD: I don’t know if I had a message to send on that, or in general in the book. Of course, the characters are displaced and I knew that they would have this predicament. They’re displaced in two different ways. In the Palestinian context, of being refugees and not being able to return. And in the Lebanese context, of war and losing your country, in a way, to war and conflict and also ideals. I knew that I was dealing with the concept of displacement, but I didn’t necessarily have a message on it beyond wanting to see how it played out in these characters and lives in a really specific way.
For me, the idea of displacement really came specifically through these characters. What it meant to them to be displaced, and how that sort of emanated through the generations. For someone like Ziad, he just didn’t feel at home anywhere. Even though he grew up in Lebanon among other Arabs in Lebanon, his predicament is one of a refugee. There’s this knowledge of what’s happened to him and his family that, I think, complicates his life. That has been passed down through generations in the characters, that knowledge that this displacement has happened, and this inability to return. Though the characters might have different levels of assimilation or comfort, I wanted to explore how displacement showed up in that way.
AC: What do you hope people take away from your book?
HD: I don’t have any takeaways. The beauty of reading is that it’s so personal. The author can have some intentions, or no intentions, and a million different readers will come up with a million different ways of looking at it. I think people come to a work from wherever they are that day, that week, that year. I think they bring to the book their own meaning. That’s what I’m interested in, is seeing how this book resonates with people and what it means to them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hasan Dudar is the author of Carryout, a forthcoming short story collection with the University of Iowa Press. He is originally from Toledo, Ohio, and currently lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC, where he works in broadcast media. His fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast and Pinch, among other places, and was awarded the 2025 Pinch Literary Award in Fiction. A graduate of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Hasan’s reporting has appeared in various publications including USA Today, Detroit Free Press, The Toledo Blade, Bloomberg News, TRT World, and Aljazeera America. In 2015, he co-produced the award-winning documentary The Last of Little Syria, which follows some of the last Arab American residents living in Toledo, Ohio’s historic Arab enclave.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Amaris Castillo is the author of Bodega Stories, a forthcoming creative nonfiction collection from the University Press of Florida. A former newspaper reporter, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Lowell Sun, Bradenton Herald, and elsewhere. She lives in Florida with her family. Learn more about her work at amariscastillo.com.