Ghassān Kanafānī

A classic of Arabic fiction and of what Kanafani termed ‘resistance literature’

Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Under the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun, things grow increasingly oppressive. Breezily conversational and disarmingly lyrical, this short novel delivers a shuddering dose of horror.

Collected here alongside the titular novella are six short stories, including the timeless, resonant ‘Letter from Gaza’, Kanafani’s first published work.



And Other Palestinian Stories

Men in the Sun

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

There, in Kuwait, you'll find everything out. You'll learn everything. You're still a boy, and you know no more of life than a babe in arms knows of its house. School teaches nothing. It only teaches laziness. So leave it and plunge into the frying pan with the rest of humanity.

So we must rake care to behave suitably in all that we did, not asking for something to eat even when we were hungry, keeping silent when your father spoke of his difficulties and nodding and smiling when he said to us: "Go and climb the mountain, and don't come back till midday."

She represents something in my life that I cannot do without

I loved Nadia from habit, the same habit that made me love all that generation which had been so brought up on defeat and displacement that it had come to think that a happy life was a kind of social deviation.

It was a lie, born of the tense situation, but as I uttered it I felt that I was speaking the truth for the first time.

No, my friend, I won't come to Sacramento, and I've no regrets.

, and nor will I finish what we began together in childhood. This obscure feeling that you had as you left Gaza, this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within you. It must expand, you must seek it in order to find yourself, here among the ugly debris of defeat.

I won't come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia's leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth.

Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you.

Men in the Sun quotes

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