Pauls Toutonghi — Author
Bio
Pauls Toutonghi was born in 1976 to an Arab father and a Latvian mother. He speaks Latvian, French, and a little Arabic. His work has been published in Harper's, The New Yorker, Granta, VQR, Tin House, The Yemen Observer, The New York Times, Zoetrope: All-Story, Outside Magazine, One Story, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere. He's won a Pushcart Prize and been a Hawthornden Fellow. His four books - from Knopf, PRH, and Simon & Schuster - have been translated into Portuguese, Italian, German, and Latvian. He holds a PhD in Postcolonial Lit from Cornell University and – for the past 20 years – he has taught longform nonfiction writing and fiction writing at Lewis & Clark College. The Netflix film adaptation of his book, Dog Gone, was released in 2023.
Books
Selected Essays and Journalism
There Was and There Was Not
The paralyzed ruins of Aleppo.
Our Father's Body
An Egyptian refugee, the construction of whiteness, and what the U.S. census leaves out.
The Play's the Thing
At the 2025 National Pinochle Association's annual tournament in Raleigh, aging players fight to keep their beloved game—and community—alive.
In a New Novel, a Secular Muslim-American Rejects the Burden of Labels
A review of Ali Eteraz's Native Believer.
Death and The Animals: A Meditation on Life
On dogs that came back, trapped goats, and dying cats.
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