R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
Khaled Khalifa’s “Death is hard work” is on the longlist of the National Book Award!
The shortlist will be announced on October 8th, and the winner on November 20th.
The book has received wonderful praise:
“Masterly”
The New York Review of Books
“Brilliant” “Unforgettable”
Wall Street Journal
“Astonishing” “recalls Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”” “The power of the novel — of all Khalifa’s novels — is that it unfolds within a human context”
Los Angeles Times
“Intensely readable” “wryly compelling”
Financial times
“Robust in its doubts, humane in its gaze and gentle in its persistence”
The Guardian
“Stunning”
Herald
“Compelling book. …
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.
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 …
Read The National’s review (2019)
In Antoon’s latest novel, The Book of Collateral Damage [aka Index], the Iraqi author returns to the subject of the Second Gulf War…
But Antoon is too good a writer to simply retread old terrain. For this, his fourth novel, he explores new ground by depicting turmoil and carnage through a series of richly diverse second-hand sources.
