In her blog lecturer Ashleen Williams explains why she has adopted Khalifa’s book in her class:
This fall I’ll be assigning No Knives in the Kitchens of this City by Khaled Khalifa for Honors 101 – “Self, Society and Identity.”
This is probably the best piece of literature I’ve had the chance to read in the last 6 or so months, and in my quest to assign my students readings from outside a western perspective, this is the obvious choice.

Marianne Payot, for L’Express
Published on March 5, 2017
Sinan Antoon brushes off the superb portrait of a man carried away by the maelstrom of the Middle East and raises the veil over Baghdad.
It is the story of a broken destiny, that of a young man who wanted to become a sculptor and who ends up washing the dead. Like his father and all his ancestors before him. A craft that knows no respite in contemporary worn torn Iraq.

My sister whom I have not seen for more than two years, told me over the phone that she would cross the ocean in a boat. Then she hung up.

 
By David Ulin, for Barnes and nobels, published January 9, 2017
Why do we read fiction? There are as many answers to that question, I suppose, as there are readers, but for me, one of the primary reasons is empathy. Whatever else it bestows, fiction opens up the inner life, collapsing the distance between us and its narrators, its characters, connecting us at the level of the heart. To read a novel is to know someone else on the most intimate level, to sit with them, to grieve with them, to …