What was the genesis of Crescent? Abu-Jaber: I was teaching a class in Middle Eastern culture at UCLA as a guest lecturer, in 1995. The class was filled with students who were all either Arab or Iranian Americans and they were all very interested in identity work, in finding out about their cultures or their parents. Almost none of them could speak Arabic or Farsi. They didn't know, they were just really eager to learn. It was uplifting. I was energized, and that's when I started writing the novel. ... There really is this little Lebanese café in the heart of the section of town they called the Taran-tula. I remember thinking-_How interesting, it's Lebanese but it's an Iranian part of town. I started thinking about how cafés create their own cultural environment, their own micro cultures. I knew I wanted to write about food, I wanted to write about Arabic food. And I'm a food critic too. Crescent is about a woman who's Iraqi-American and she's a chef. She cooks in an Arabic restaurant in Los Angeles and she falls in love with an Iragi immigrant. He's kind of mysterious. He teaches linguistics at UCLA. It explores a little bit about the question of exile. That's one of my literary obsessions -what a painful thing it is to be an immigrant. How when you leave your home country, you don't really know what it is that's about to happen to you.