In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, Stephen Greenblatt remarks: “Great writers are … specialists in cultural exchange. … They take symbolic materials from one zone of the culture and move them to another, augmenting their emotional force, altering their significance, linking them with other materials taken from a different one, changing their place in a larger social design” (245). Greenblatt’s description of “great writers” applies especially well to transnational and so-called ethnic writers in the United States. In this paper, I look at how Arab American writers Laila Halaby and Alia Yunis incorporate different oral storytelling traditions from the Arab world within American narrative contexts. In the process, I examine the ways in which each writer offers contrasting views of the limits and possibilities for Arab American cultural expression. While Halaby offers a bleak narrative of cross-cultural anxiety that links the devouring threat of “ghouls” of Arab fairy tales to the alluring promise of happiness in the United States, Yunis offers a redemptive narrative that draws on the life-sustaining potential of Scheherazadian modes of storytelling to accommodate a century of Arab American presence and multiple ways of belonging in the United States. In addressing the contrast between Halaby’s and Yunis’s treatments of cultural mobility, transnational belonging, and Arab American experiences, this paper positions itself in alignment with Steven Salaita’s call for an “emphasis on plurality [as] the only plausible way to discuss Arab Americans” (1). It also participates in a type of transnational and multicultural analysis from a position that looks at what Ella Shohat has called the “liminal zone of exile” (312) between and across multiple, sometimes divergent, often intersecting landscapes and signposts of identification and cultural expression.