Published by Bresciaoggi, May 31, 2018
“The Frightened” live and suffer in Syria
Tearing, creeping, uninterrupted. It is fear, a devastating fury that annihilates. How to define it: state of mind, obsession, modus vivendi? Surely it is a force that takes on different connotations, from anxiety to torment to panic.

Published by La Repubblica, April 15, 2018
Love and Xanax in Damascus

He escaped to Berlin. She remained in Syria: hoping to find her brother, who has “disappeared” at the hands of the regime. But is it possible to really love each other when your survival is conditioned by fear?

Published by Avvenire, March 20, 2018
In his work the Syrian writer can not break away from the tormented city: “Despite everything, mine has never been a country prone to fanaticism: plural identity is an ancient value.”

Published by Il Manifesto, March 28, 2018
The novel about a prisoner’s life, a prisoner of violence but also of the thousand unpardonable compromises that a dictatorship imposes on oppressed individuals. There are no knives in the kitchens of this city (Bompiani, pp. 288, euro 18), tells through the life events of a family in Aleppo the genesis and consolidation of the Assad regime that dominates Syria since the Sixties, describing the internal repression and annihilation, which invites us to reflect on all forms of contemporary despotism.

Published by Ansa Med, March 19, 2018
“We would have liked the government to listen to us, to open up a new path for human rights and a better life, but we were a group of deluded, dreamers: we did not understand that it is not allowed for Arabs to enjoy democracy” . So the Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa spoke of the first hopes of change nourished by the demonstrations in the square of March 2011, then resulted in repression and in the last, tragic seven years of war.

Published by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 11, 2018

In a night-black novel Khaled Khalifa carries the dreams of his homeland to the graveA man named Nightingale. He would have to be a singer and a lover fluttering through a scenario of magical realism or an old Oriental poem. Not one, however, to whom the concern for the corpse of his father, who is already decaying, gives the feeling that he is still a creature capable of being found with a little backbone, and not merely “jelly-mass.”