
Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru
The Arab Spring has produced many an engrossing story of individual courage. But the story of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, while certainly daring, inventive, and brash, isn't exactly inspiring. Amina, the purported author of the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, gained a small, dedicated following to her chronicle of life in Syria, where an uprising begun in late January of this year. Amina became "an unlikely hero of revolt," as The Guardian put it in a May profile, telling stories of her father protecting her from arrest by Syrian authorities and recounting her struggles to make sense of the change