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, …

A review by David Ulin for the Los Angeles Times, February 8th, 2019
“If you really want to erase or distort a story,” Khaled Khalifa declares in his astonishing new novel “Death Is Hard Work,” “you should turn it into several different stories with different endings and plenty of incidental details.” He’s referring to the salutary comforts of narrative. This — or so we like to reassure ourselves — is one reason we turn to literature: as a balm, an expression of the bonds that bring us together, rather than the …

The night post  is on the shortlist of the International Prize of Arabic Fiction (IPAF), or Arab Man Booker, that will be awarded in Abu Dhabi in April 2019.
“A writer of her time” who signs an “original and powerful” novel
– Mediapart –

Review and interview by Antoine Perraud and Faiza Zerouala for Mediapart, January 8th, 2019.
The Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat, captures the torments of refugees, their exile, their dispossession and the challenge posed to our societies, in an original and powerful epistolary novel, Courrier de nuit (Actes Sud). A serious and essential encounter.