By Robin Yassin-Kassab, The Guardian, September 24, 2016
Were Syrians wise to revolt? Aren’t they worse off now? Such questions misapprehend the situation. Syrians didn’t decide out of the blue to destroy a properly functioning state. The state had been destroying them, and itself, for decades. In No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, Khaled Khalifa, poet, screenwriter and Syria’s most celebrated contemporary novelist, chronicles this long political, social and cultural collapse, the “incubator of contemporary demons”.

The story stretches back to the first world war and forward to the American …

A review by Marcia Lynx Qualey, for The National, September 21, 2016
Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, like his acclaimed novel In Praise of Hatred (2013), is guided by a single powerful emotion. While In Praise tracks hatred as it seethes in and around Aleppo, No Knives, also translated by Leri Price, quickens around shame.

Betty Rosen for The Point Magazine, March 2016.
Below a few excerpts. VisitThe Point Magazine‘s website for the full article.
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Of the abundant works of fiction produced by Iraqi writers in the past ten years, Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer and Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition are two of the comparatively few to have appeared in English translation. Antoon published his novel The Corpse Washer in Arabic in 2010 and his own English translation in 2013. The Corpse Exhibition, published in English in 2014 in a translation by Jonathan Wright, contains short …

Olivia Snaije, for Publishing Perspectives, December 2015
The Shell as part of the “top books” of 2015. Snaije says:
“Last but not least, La Coquille, (The Shell) by Moustafa Khalifé, a book I read in French, translated from Arabic, gave me the distinct feeling once I had finished it that I was no longer the same. Masterfully translated by Stéphanie Dujols, this autobiographical novel about 13 years spent in a Syrian prison is devastating and altogether mesmerizing, as terrible as the story is.

Below is an excerpt, read the whole interview here.
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Youssefl Rakha: I go on about this so as to put you in the picture: the nineties, when I started showing my writing to people—that’s when the clash between younger prose poets and older guardians of the poetic ancien régime took place. This is partly of course what The Crocodiles is about. So, when I started writing, I found myself writing prose poems though I thought I wanted to write short stories.