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Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of There’s Plenty of Sunshine Where You’re Headed by Ghassan Zeineddine, which will be published on March 16th, 2027 by Tin House/Zando. You can pre-order your copy here.
From the award-winning author of Dearborn, a tragicomic story collection that moves between Lebanon and Michigan, exploring migration, war, family, and the enduring pull of home.
In a village haunted by unexploded cluster bombs, a chorus of matriarchs obsess over a poet-turned-mayor who struggles to lead with a confident hand. While patrolling a public pool in Dearborn, Michigan, a 72-year-old lifeguard reminisces on his youthful days at a Beirut beach club and finds unexpected companionship in a glamorous widow. Driven to the brink by his visiting mother-in-law, a factory worker seeks sanctuary in a rented storage unit—a private world that struggles to stay insulated from the trauma of global conflict.
Spanning the 1970s to the present day, There’s Plenty of Sunshine Where You’re Headed alternates stories set in Lebanon and Dearborn, tracing lives linked by migration, memory, loss, and longing. With his trademark humor and sincerity, Zeineddine offers a resonant portrait of the Arab and Arab American experience and the stubborn, surprising ways people keep building lives, no matter where they land.
Here is the cover, designed by Lucy Kim:
Ghassan Zeineddine: The stories in There’s Plenty of Sunshine Where You’re Headed are set in Lebanon and Dearborn, Michigan. A suburb of Detroit, Dearborn has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country. On the east side of town, the Arab side, you’ll find Arabic restaurants and bakeries, grocery stores filled with goods from Lebanon, Yemeni coffeeshops, mosques, and the Arab American National Museum. When we’re in Dearborn, my wife, Rana, and I speak mostly in Arabic with people. It makes us feel in touch with Lebanon.
I grew up in the Middle East and immigrated to Washington, D.C. in 1990, at the age of 10. I’d go on to spend most of my 20s and part of my 30s in Beirut before Rana and I moved to Dearborn, where we bought our first house and I began to write about the Arab American community. Our children were born in Michigan. Whenever someone asks our eldest daughter, Alma, where she’s originally from, she says, “Michigan.” This summer, we won’t be able to visit Lebanon because of the volatile political situation, but we always have Dearborn, which has become a second home. An American city with an Arab pulse.
Initially, when my wonderful editor, Masie Cochran, and I were brainstorming ideas for the cover, we both wanted something colorful and vibrant. An image that captured the two distinct but connected worlds of my story collection. Lucy Kim’s brilliant design does all of this and more. With Beirut placed on top of the reddish sun and Dearborn below, the cover brings both cities to vivid life. The airplane flying over Beirut and another flying over Dearborn suggest arrival and departure, and circular movement between both places. Moreover, what I appreciate so much about Kim’s representation of Beirut is its religious and architectural diversity—there are traditional Lebanese stone houses and skyscrapers, and mosques and a church.
I’ve become obsessed with the cover. Every time I look at it, I think of Beirut and Dearborn, two cities that I love and that have shaped me as a person and as a writer.
Lucy Kim: I really love reading and working on short story collections and this one is no exception—Ghassan’s characters are based in Lebanon as well as in Dearborn, MI. They are connected by their Lebanese Muslim heritage and, as such, they all bear the trauma of a nation that has lived and continues to live with constant war and violence, whether the characters emigrated decades ago or are second generation immigrants who’ve never stepped foot in the Middle East. These characters face threats daily, both physical and emotional. What’s so amazing is how Ghassan is able to capture the resonance of their shared trauma in the face of their surroundings with such pathos and humor. It’s this resonance that I wanted to try to depict on the cover, the two worlds of Dearborn and Lebanon in dialogue with each other. Since Beirut has so many unique buildings in it, I focused on that skyline to be the counterpart for the suburban houses of Dearborn, by using edited bits of stock art. My initial design had fewer buildings, and Ghassan suggested adding more to try and capture the bustling liveliness of modern Beirut. Using very bright, pop-candy colors felt entirely appropriate given the humorous situations some of these characters find themselves in, and Ghassan agreed. The result is a clue to the reader that this is a very unique perspective into the Middle Eastern Muslim experience.
The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “There’s Plenty of Sunshine Where You’re Headed” by Ghassan Zeineddine appeared first on Electric Literature.
