A review by Elliot Ackerman for The New York Times Review of Books, published February 26th, 2019
How many times can you read about barrel bombs falling on civilians in Aleppo or Islamic State execution squads or sarin gas attacks before the sheer quantity of incidents denudes each of meaning? The facts, devoid of a narrative, lose their weight. That’s the power of mass violence: its ability to transform specific loss into general loss, numbing our collective consciousness. This is why novelists like Khalifa are so critical in these times. They …

Interview by Tom Zoellner, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Published February 18th, 2019
ELIAS KHOURY MIGHT BE the Lebanese version of what James Michener is to the United States, or Carlos Fuentes is to Mexico— a big-hitting novelist who aims not merely for the human heart but also for the soul of a nation. His latest book, My Name Is Adam, is the first volume of a projected trilogy about the nakba — the Arabic term for the forced removal of Palestinians from the newborn state of Israel in 1948. The protagonist …

A review by Avraham Burg, for the Haaretz, May 2018
It’s very hard to review something so close to perfection. About all one can do after such an engrossing read is describe, quote, compare and reflect. Elias Khoury’s remarkable literary skill and the brilliant Hebrew translation of Yehouda Shenhav-Sharabani (a work of art in itself) make “Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam” one of the most poignant and important novels of recent years. After it, no words are needed, if only because it is one of the most eloquent works ever …

Review by  Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, for En Attendant Nadeau / Mediapart, published May 2018
There are subjects that force the novel to reinvent itself. As the narrator of the last book of Elias Khoury puts it, “I am writing a novel that is unlike any other, because it belongs to a literary genre that has no name and I doubt that it exists “.

Review by Olivia Snaije, for The National, February 25th, 2019

Khalifa, who lives in ­Damascus and has remained in Syria throughout the war, tells The National that the inspiration for his novel came from a personal experience. “In 2013, I had a heart attack and I was in the hospital and I thought about what would happen to me and my family if I died,”

A review by Sam Sacks, for the Wall Street Journal, Februay
Khaled Khalifa’s “Death Is Hard Work” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 180 pages, $25) begins with an old man’s dying wish: that his children bury him in the family plot in the town of his birth, a few hundred kilometers from the capital. It might be a reasonable request in normal times, but this is contemporary Syria, where to walk to the market is to risk being killed. “Better to tend to the dead,” the man’s son Bolbol decides in resignation; “after all, …