R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
The mission of the National Book Award is to “celebrate the best literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture”
The winner will be announced on November 20th.
Death is hard work has received a lot of praise (see below) in the various countries where it was published (see list of cessions below).
Bulbul’s father just passed away in a Damascus hospital. His last request to his son was to be buried in his hometown of Aannabiya, in the province of Aleppo.
In Stella Maris, Adam has decided to write his story, that of the “New Adam”, which, he would like to believe, starts when he runs away from home at 15, to go as far as possible from his childhood in the ghetto of Lydda (My name is Adam, Children of the ghetto 1), and from his mother Manal. The New Adam is in a painful quest of a restful identity: “I want to become a Jew”, he says. “This is impossible” he is told.
Following the life story of two inseparable friends, Hannah and Zakaria, from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century in Aleppo, No one prayed over their graves, reveals a buzzing, multiconfessional, libertine, tolerant society, coming to grips with the various forms of death.
A detective story set on the background of family and sectarian feuds, The king of India, explores with the right dose of irony, the meaning of attachment to the land.
Insightful and sarcastic, this is the powerful story of a young man diagnosed with leukemia. This debut novel by young Saudi writer Aziz Mohammed tackles modern Arab life.
Interview by Hala Kodmani for Liberation, September 2019
In her book, the novelist and activist brings together the testimonies of those she knew and accompanied in her country at war. Nurses, teachers, mothers, often spent in prison, they survived the terror and the war without ever giving up. “Heroines” in search of a secular and democratic revolution.
Samar Yazbek: “Through the voice of these Syrian women, I want to say that we are not victims but resistants”
By Lilia Tak-Tak, in La madeleine des livres, Septemner 2019
“The frightened” is a very beautiful, very strong novel, which depicts with a lot of intensity the fear, anguish, and suffering of a young woman, a young man and by extension those of a people. Feelings that feed each other and create a system of communicating vessels. A real mirror game.
Through the voice of Sulayma, the main character, Dima Wannous leads us into a novel with a complex construction, similar to the meanders of the inner thoughts of Sulayma, thereby bringing a …
By Will Preston, for Full Stop (2019)
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The very concept of “collateral damage,” after all, rests on the logic that others lack their own stories. They are only a means to an end: an acceptable loss, a supporting character in the narrative of someone else’s war. But to what extent? Within the framework of Antoon’s novel, it is not just the country’s people, or history, or cities, that have been reduced to collateral damage in the great American tragedy of the Iraq War. It is Iraq itself.
By Ghyath Manhel (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville – University of Kufa, Iraq), for World Literature Today (2019)
So many books have been written about the Iraq War (2003–2011) from both sides of that conflict, but Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage is unique in that it chooses to represent the human and environmental cost of that war. Nameer, an Iraqi American intellectual, visits his home country after the war and is traumatized by the hurt and damage he witnesses. Navigating the divide of his home and host cultures’ views of the war, he …
