Elias Khoury

In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunes, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma, while his spiritual son Khaleel nurses the older man, recalling the story of Yunes's life from the perspective of the history of Palestinian exile, in a novel that puts human faces to a political tragedy. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Gate of the Sun

Anton Shammas

Vivian Eden

Anton Shammas’s Arabesques was a literary and a political astonishment when it first came out in 1988, a book that showed how sophisticated fiction could engage the urgent political issues of the day not as propaganda but as and through the imaginative and linguistic means of literature itself. The astonishment began with the language in which the book was written. Shammas, from a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Israel, wrote his novel in Hebrew, as no Arab novel had been before, a choice that was provocative both to Arab and Jewish readers. The novel is written in an elegant and elaborate style, alive with echoes, and it is divided into two section, “The Tale” and “The Teller.” “The Tale” tells of several generations of family life in a rural village, of the interplay of past and present, of how memory intersects with history in a part of the world where different peoples have both lived together and struggled with each other for centuries, and the story as it is told is concrete and sensual, rueful and comic, full of curious and memorable characters and of a boy’s wonder at the world. “The Teller” is about the writer’s voyage out of that world to Paris and to the United States, as he comes into his vocation as a writer, and it raises questions of the authority of the storyteller and the nature of the self that have come to preoccupy so many writers today. Shammas’s tour de force is a personal and a political narrative and a reinvention of the novel as a way of envisioning and responding to historical and cultural legacies and conflicts. It is a beautiful manifestation of how words can begin to open up the untold stories of lost worlds and the prospect of a changed world where those stories, and others to come, may resonate anew.

Arabesques

Little Mountain

Yalo

Ilyās Khūrī

A journalist researches the death of a civil servant whose body was found in a garbage pile, uncovering the tumultuous events and tragedies of the civil war in Lebanon as he questions the man's wife, a watchman, a militia man, and the doctor who performed the autopsy.

White Masks

Humphrey Davies

As Though She Were Sleeping

When Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned, he begins to sort through his twisted memories of childhood, life as a solider, and the crimes he did or did not commit.

Dzieci getta. Mam na imię Adam

A moving story about Palestine's 1948 Exodus by the Arab world's finest living novelist. First in a trilogy. Long exiled in New York, Palestinian ex-pat Adam Dannoun thought he knew himself. But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changes everything. As he investigates exactly what occurred in 1948 in Lydda, the city of his birth, he gathers stories that speak to his people's bravery, ingenuity, and resolve in the face of unimaginable hardship.

My Name Is Adam

The Children of the Ghetto

Yalo is a young man growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the long years of the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother, who "lost her face in the mirror," he falls in with a dangerous gang whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a frightening reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned. He is forced to confess to crimes of which he has no recollection. As he writes, and rewrites, he begins to grasp his family's past and recall all that his psyche has buried, and the true Yalo begins to emerge--Publisher.

1995, campo profughi di Shatìla, Libano. All’ospedale Galilea viene portato, in coma, un anziano combattente per la liberazione della Palestina che in gioventù aveva fatto da padre putativo al medico-infermiere che ora lo assiste, il dottor Khalìl. Rifiutandosi di lasciarlo morire, Khalìl decide di curarlo con la terapia della parola e si lancia in un lungo racconto che, coprendo un arco temporale di oltre cinquant’anni, ripercorre la vita dei due uomini ora chiusi nella stanza d’ospedale. Alle tappe del leggendario amore che ha unito Yùnis il fedayin alla moglie rimasta in Galilea e diventata cittadina israeliana La porta del sole affianca le vicende di tutta un’umanità che ha subito la Storia senza lasciare traccia di sé. “Bisogna riconoscere ad ognuno il diritto di raccontare la propria storia,” scriveva il grande poeta Mahmùd Darwìsh e a quest’imperativo, con mano ferma, La porta del sole risponde. Denunciando ogni forma di vittimismo, abbandonando ogni retorica volta a mitizzare eroismo e martirio e ammettendo le debolezze della sua gente senza per questo screditarla, Elias Khoury riesce nella difficile impresa di raccontare i palestinesi in quanto individui e non soltanto la loro causa. Dal romanzo nel 2004 il noto regista egiziano Yousri Nasrallah ha tratto il film che porta lo stesso titolo.

La porta del sole

Children of the Ghetto

City Gates

"Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."--Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times From the author of Gate of the Sun and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab World" (The Washington Post Book World) comes the many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice. Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, Little Gandhi becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Once again, as John Leonard wrote in Harper's Magazine, Elias Khoury "fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."

The Journey of Little Gandhi

Alice, ancienne prostituée devenue femme de service dans un hôtel de passe à Beyrouth, raconte au narrateur les multiples histoires qui font d'elle la gardienne d'une mémoire collective. Surtout depuis ce jour de septembre 1982 - juste après l'entrée des Israéliens dans Beyrouth - où elle a trouvé dans la rue le corps du cireur de chaussures Abdelkarim, surnommé "le petit Gandhi". Autour de cet homme, de son fils Hosn le coiffeur, de sa fille Soâd la "demeurée", du pasteur Amin qui devint fou, de l'Américain Davis, inconsolable depuis la mort de son chien, de la voluptueuse madame Noha, de l'impresario (le proxénète) Abou Jamil et de tant d'autres se tissent les mille et une nuits des passions humaines - quête de sagesse, mirages d'amour ou de fortune -, qui toutes confluent vers le chaos de la guerre promise.

Le voyage du petit Gandhi

Le petit homme et la guerre

The Broken Mirrors

Karim Chammas returns to Lebanon, his family, and his past after ten years of establishing a new life in France. Back in Beirut, Karim reacquaints himself with his brother Nassim, now married to his former love Hind, and old friends from the leftist political circles within which he once roamed under the nom de guerre Sinalcol. By the end of his six-month stay, he has been reintroduced to the chaos of cultural, religious and political battles that continue to rage in Lebanon. Overwhelmed by the experiences of his return, Karim is forced to contemplate his identity and his place in Lebanon's history. The story of Karim and his family is born of other stories that intertwine to form an imposing fresco of Lebanese society over the past fifty years. Broken Mirrors examines the roots of an endemic civil war and a country's unsettled past.

Sinalcol

Broken Mirrors

Meelya's dreams are her refuge from events that threaten her or escape her understanding. She leaves her home in Lebanon to live in Nazareth with her Palestinian husband, but Mansour - an older man who fell for her beauty - is frustrated by her spiritual absence. When Mansour's brother's death demands a move to Jaffa - the centre of early tensions between Jewish settlers and displaced Palestinians - Meelya withdraws further into the realm of dreams. Expecting the birth of their son, Mansour can only watch as she cuts loose from the physical world. Over three traumatic nights, past, present and future merge seamlessly into a series of visions that draw the reader towards a conclusion that is powerfully symbolic of the ongoing troubles in the Middle East.

Why did he return to Beirut? Why did Karim leave his wife and children and the life he had built in France to return to a homeland still reeling from civil war? Was it to answer his brother Nasim's call to raise a hospital out of the ashes? Was it to kick over the traces of past love affairs? Or to establish the truth behind his father's death? Or was it to confront at last the ghost of the man known only as "Sinalcol", a legendary phantom of the civil war, and a broken mirror of himself? In Beirut, Karim will learn the fate of old comrades, and face a brother who shares a past as divided as the city itself. And he will find that peace is only ever fleeting in a war without end.

The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol

Written in the opening phases of the Lebanese Civil War (1975--1990), Little Mountain is told from the perspectives of three characters: a Joint Forces fighter; a distressed civil servant; and an amorphous figure, part fighter, part intellectual. Elias Khoury's language is poetic and piercing as he tells the story of Beirut, civil war, and fractured identity.

Elias Khoury

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