This paper examines critically the Orientalism of the networks that enable Arabic literature to reach anglophone audiences in translation in the United States today. Beginning from Edward Said’s axiomatic 1990 diagnosis of Arabic literature as “embargoed” from the U.S. literary field, I argue that since then a far more complex picture has emerged of the conditions within which Arabic literary texts circulate in the U.S. in English translation. Over a period marked by two U.S.-led wars in Iraq, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and an exponential growth in the number of Americans learning Arabic for reasons both personal and professional, the networks that connect Arabic literary texts and anglophone readers have become denser and more intimate. I focus on the changing role of the Arabic-to-English translator in the U.S. context as an indexical figure for such shifts. I propose that if this translator has conventionally been seen, per Said, as bearing an ethical burden of representing the Arab other to an Orientalist American public--as described by Roger Allen (2010, 2015), Marilyn Booth (2008, 2010), and Michelle Hartman (2012, 2015)--then she or he now translates for an American readership to whom the Arab Middle East is always already comprehended as familiar: knowable via social media and cable news, through the academic study of its languages, history, and contemporary geopolitics, or through firsthand experience. Contra facile celebrations of what Waïl Hassan has called an “unprecedented boom in literary translation from Arabic,” what new (perhaps unacknowledged) forms of Orientalism are produced, reified, and transmitted within or alongside such apparent knowledge? What ethical obligations fall upon a translator today who must contend not with perceptions of Arabic literature’s foreignness, but of its familiarity? Said and the critics who have followed in his footsteps offer incisive paradigms for thinking translation ethics as a problem of self and other; yet, what new approaches are required to theorize the ethics of translating Arabic literature into English in the United States in 2020? How have present-day translators contested Orientalist modes of reception by emphasizing not the difference of the Arabic source text, but its aesthetics, literariness, and formal linguistic effects?