Elias Khoury

A stunning portrait of a young orphan living in Beirut on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War "We need the voice of Elias Khoury - detailed, exquisite, humane - more than ever." -- Naomi Shihab Nye In the Beirut of Elias Khoury's first novel, children converse with sparrows, walk with pine trees, and embrace their branches like old companions. A young orphan named Mansour is trying to locate his beginnings. Twelve toes (no ten), a family name, and a father. "Every evening, we retell the story. The story has no ending." And so his tale takes shape again. Mansour exchanges candied almonds with a saint and speaks to a woman who would like to trade her eyebrows for his, captured by their beauty. He watches fava beans leap from a bowl and climb up his arm. With each curve of Mansour's dreams, Elias Khoury sets the coordinates for the questions and concerns that will radiate throughout his exquisite body of fiction. On the Relations of the Circle was published in 1975, the year the Lebanese Civil War began. Khoury's visions of the past, present, and future follow paths as unpredictable as the sun's rays. They beam and bend, his tales expand and contract, as if anticipating the outbreak of war. Mansour resists the fractures and erasures of war. He buys pens and notebooks, sketching a map of his city as he sees and feels it. "Mansour decides that life is beautiful, that the earth deserves the swaying of trees." Elias Khoury's recursive stories, glimpses, and dreams hold fast to Mansour's decision, offering a story of beauty and humanity just before it vanishes.

2024 NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Award Finalist An acclaimed Lebanese writer speaks to the complexity of the Palestinian experience in a devastating account of resilience and loss Weaving personal and cultural memory into a tale that humanizes the complex Palestinian experience, Star of the Sea traces the contours of the unspeakable. Adam Dannoun's story is one of beginnings. Born in a war-torn Israel, Adam dreams of becoming a writer. He is just an infant when Jewish forces uproot and massacre thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, including his own father. Adam's mother, crumbling with loss, takes her son to Haifa and remarries. Soon she feels stifled by her new husband. Adam flees this lifeless home and writes himself a second beginning. With nothing but his father's will and the image of his mother at the doorway, Adam is born again into the streets of Haifa. Here he spins a new life alongside an auto-shop owner, Gabriel. Adam Dannoun shapeshifts into Adam Danon, an Israeli born into the Warsaw ghetto, and Gabriel's younger brother. There are limits to this charade, lines he's forbidden to cross--and when he falls in love with Gabriel's only daughter he steps, unawares, into a third life. Life after life, Adam confronts the horrors of his past. Following My Name Is Adam, Star of the Sea is the second installment of a brilliant trilogy--an epic tale of love, survival, and ongoing devastation.

A luminous, inventive, and deeply personal exploration of living in the liminal space between Jewish and Arab, ancient and modern, by a gifted Palestinian writer. Chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1988, Arabesques is a luminous novel that engages with history and politics not as propaganda but as literature. That engagement begins with the language in which the book is written: Anton Shammas, from a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Israel, wrote in Hebrew, as no Arab novelist had before. The choice was provocative to both Arab and Jewish readers. Arabesques is divided into two sections: "The Tale" and "The Teller." "The Tale" tells of several generations of family life in a rural village, of the interplay of past and present, of how memory intersects with history in a part of the world where different people have both lived together and struggled against each other for centuries. "The Teller" is about the writer's voyage out of that world to Paris and the United States, as he comes into his vocation as a writer, and raises questions about the authority of the storyteller and the nature of the self. Shammas's tour de force is both a personal and a political narrative--a reinvention of the novel as a way of envisioning and responding to historical and cultural legacies and conflicts.

I Åshöjden är ingenting sig likt sedan byns fotbollslag börjatklättra i tabellerna. Nu har man nått division 3. Edward är Åshöjdens BK:s självklara spjutspets och trivs medfotbollen. Men han är inte nöjd med livet vid sidan av planenoch hoppar av skolan för att bygga ett vintersportcentrum pådet skånska höglandet. Hans spel inspireras av nyförvärvet från AIK, tar honom in ilandslaget och får honom avstängd efter att han slagit tillbakaoschyst motstånd. Samtidigt pågår livet för de andra i Åshöjden. Laget åker påträningsläger och Lillen gör lycka vid rouletten i Marseille;Jorma tränar pojklaget och får sin första artikel publicerad; Joelhamnar på sjukhus efter att ha krockat med en motspelare; ochden alkoholiserade Storken får ansvaret att bygga upp klubbensjuniorlag. Det händer mycket i Åshöjden medan Edward väljer att gå sinegen väg. Med serien Åshöjdens BK skapade Max Lundgren och ReijoStävenborg ett unikt stycke svensk seriehistoria.

Banipal 67 – Elias Khoury, The Novelist presents a major feature on the celebrated Lebanese and international author, with excerpts from his latest novel Stella Maris, the second in the Children of the Ghetto trilogy, and a chapter from his first novel (until now not translated), plus in-depth articles on the corpus of novels including translations of his works into Hebrew, and reviews of his early novels. • We bid Adieu to poet Amjad Nasser in Fakhri Saleh’s essay on his poetry collections. • We introduce two winners of the Moroccan Argana International Poetry Prize – Wadih Saadeh and Hawad. • Also featured are the six shortlisted novels of the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. • Plus works by two well-known Iraqi writers: Muhammad Khudayyir and Muhsin al-Musawi – and poems by three young poets from Lebanon, Palestine and Tunisia. MANY THANKS to all our contributors, authors, translators, and editors, who have been working from home under coronavirus restrictions.

Lit by the sublime beauty and tragedy of classical Arabic poetry, a Palestinian falafel seller in New York sets out to shape fragments of his family history Weaving history, memory, and poetry, this unforgettable novel--and the 1st book in a trilogy--provides a sprawling memorial to the Nakba and the strangled lives left in its wake. Long exiled in New York, Palestinian ex-pat Adam Dannoun thought he knew himself. But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changes everything. It is when Adam encounters his former teacher that Adam discovers the story he must tell. Ma'moun's testimony brings Adam back to the first years of his life in the ghetto of Lydia, in Palestine, where his family endured thirst, hunger, and terror in the aftermath of unspeakable horror. With unmatched literary craft and empathy, Khoury peels away layers of lost stories and repressed memories to unveil Adam's story. Oscillating between two narrators--the self-reflexive "Elias Khoury" and Adam himself--Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam engages real (and invented) scholarly texts, Khoury's own work, and Adam's lost notebooks in an intertextual account of a life shadowed by atrocity.

Yalo vokste opp nærmest som et vilt dyr i borgerkrigens Beirut. Verken krigen eller freden har hatt noen positiv innvirkning på hans liv. Han finner spenning, noe penger og en slags nærkontakt med kvinner gjennom å overfalle illegitime par som møtes i en skog rett nedenfor der han bor. Inntil han en dag blir anmeldt av en kvinne han har forelsket seg i. I fengselet blir Yalo torturert. De vil at han skal tilstå langt mer enn det han har gjort, og han blir drevet til ytterpunktet av hva et menneske kan tåle. Om og om igjen prøver han å skrive sine tilståelser, og kanskje vil han en dag gjenoppstå som en annen, eller kanskje som den virkelige Yalo. Elias Khoury har med denne romanen skapt et levende speilbilde av virkeligheten i borgerkrigens Libanon, en verden der narkotika og våpen florerer og der det " i hvert offer hviler en potensiell morder og omvendt". «Ein roman til å bli svimmel av. Ikkje berre fordi han stadig undergrev sine eigne sanningar, men fordi han skriv fram eit samfunn og eit menneskesinn med eit språk som er poetisk og rått og uvanleg treffsikkert.» Marta Norheim, NRK. «Sterkt om språkløshet ... Ubarmhjertig i sinevskildringer av brutalitet og råskap og knusende ærlig når det gjelder drøftelsene av svik og skyld. Mørk og kald som en høstnatt.» Sindre Hovdenakk, VG

In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a “dialogue” between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.

In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a “dialogue” between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.

"Khoury is one of the greatest writers of our times and perhaps the greatest Arabic-language writer of this generation, definite Nobel Prize material" Avraham Burg, HaaretzWho is Adam Dannoun? Until a few months before his death in a fire in his New York apartment - a consequence of smoking in bed - he thought he knew. But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changed all that. From Mahmoud he learned the terrible truth behind his birth, a truth withheld from him for fifty-seven years by the woman he thought was his mother. This discovery leads Adam to investigate what exactly happened in 1948 in Palestine in the city of Lydda where he was born: the massacre, the forced march into the wilderness and the corralling of those citizens who did not flee into what the Israeli soldiers and their Palestinian captives came to refer to as the Ghetto. The stories he collects speak of bravery, ingenuity and resolve in the face of unimaginable hardship. Saved from the flames that claimed him, they are his lasting and crucial testament. Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

Gate of the Sun is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love. Khalil--like Elias Khoury--is a truth collector, trying to make sense of the fragments and various versions of stories that have been told to him. His voice is intimate and direct, his memories are vivid, his humanity radiates from every page. Khalil lets his mind wander through time, from village to village, from one astonishing soul to another, and takes us with him. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.

Why did he return to Beirut? Why did Karim leave his wife and children and the life he had built in France to return to a homeland still reeling from civil war? Was it to answer his brother Nasim's call to raise a hospital out of the ashes? Was it to kick over the traces of past love affairs? Or to establish the truth behind his father's death? Or was it to confront at last the ghost of the man known only as "Sinalcol", a legendary phantom of the civil war, and a broken mirror of himself? In Beirut, Karim will learn the fate of old comrades, and face a brother who shares a past as divided as the city itself. And he will find that peace is only ever fleeting in a war without end.

Yalo propels us into a skewed universe of brutal misunderstanding, of love and alienation, of self-discovery and luminous transcendence. At the center of the vortex stands Yalo, a young man drifting between worlds like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother who "lost her face in the mirror," he falls in with a dangerous circle whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a horrifying reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and armed robbery, and is imprisoned. Tortured and interrogated at length, he is forced to confess to crimes of which he has little or no recollection. As he writes, and rewrites his testimony, he begins to grasp his family's past, and the true Yalo begins to emerge. Ha'aretz calls Yalo "a heartbreaking book . . . hypnotic in beauty."

This is a study of performance during revolution and revolt in the Arab world. Addressing the history of Arab theatre, it centres on legacy of the late Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous, whose monumental plays incited audiences to rise up against tyranny decades ago. With writers from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Kuwait and Yemen, this book includes both discussions and personal narratives, alongside a number of specially commissioned portraits of contemporary Arab theatre artists. Exploring cultural practices – from reading plays in a classroom to performing in a security state and directing in theatres, prisons, and international festivals – it uncovers the flourishing of art in times of revolt.

This is a study of performance during revolution and revolt in the Arab world. Addressing the history of Arab theatre, it centres on legacy of the late Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous, whose monumental plays incited audiences to rise up against tyranny decades ago. With writers from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Kuwait and Yemen, this book includes both discussions and personal narratives, alongside a number of specially commissioned portraits of contemporary Arab theatre artists. Exploring cultural practices – from reading plays in a classroom to performing in a security state and directing in theatres, prisons, and international festivals – it uncovers the flourishing of art in times of revolt.

Meelya's dreams are her refuge from events that threaten her or escape her understanding. She leaves her home in Lebanon to live in Nazareth with her Palestinian husband, but Mansour - an older man who fell for her beauty - is frustrated by her spiritual absence. When Mansour's brother's death demands a move to Jaffa - the centre of early tensions between Jewish settlers and displaced Palestinians - Meelya withdraws further into the realm of dreams. Expecting the birth of their son, Mansour can only watch as she cuts loose from the physical world. Over three traumatic nights, past, present and future merge seamlessly into a series of visions that draw the reader towards a conclusion that is powerfully symbolic of the ongoing troubles in the Middle East.

Yalo är en fattig ung man från Beirut. Han förhörs av polisen för sina påstådda brott: våldtäkt, rån och bombattentat. Men vem är egentligen skyldig? Hans liv har präglats av inbördeskrigets våld och skräck. Kriget har format hans personlighet och attityd. Vilka är hans egna brott, vilka är krigets och vilka är historiens? Endast kärleken erbjuder en räddning. Yalo är förälskad i Shirin och kan inte förstå varför hon anklagar honom för våldtäkt. Förhörsledaren ber Yalo skriva ner sitt livs historia, och han försöker, igen och igen och igen. För varje gång förändras innebörden lite grand och nya fakta dyker upp. Vem är offer, vem är förövare? Varken för Yalo själv eller för läsaren är det lätt att avgöra eller enkelt att döma. Elias Khoury är författare, dramatiker och journalist från Libanon. På svenska finns sedan tidigare romanerna Solens port och Som om hon sover.

Milia's response to her new husband Mansour and to the Arab World of 1947 is to close her eyes and drift into parallel worlds. Identities shift. Present, past, and future mingle and merge: she finds herself able to converse with the dead and foresee the future. As the novel progresses in glimpses, Milia's dreams become more navigable than the strange and obstinate "reality" in which she finds herself, and the two realms grow ever more entangled. This wondrous tapestry of love, faith, history, poetry, and vision cuts to the very heart of the deep-rooted conflicts of the region and breaks new literary ground.

Yalo was a soldier on one of the many sides in Lebanon's sectarian civil war, before becoming a deserter and a thief, a nightwatchman in Paris, an arms smuggler, and then a rapist. And then he falls in love with his victim - who turns him in to the police. This novel is a modern Thousand and One Nights, a series of confessions extracted under torture, a recitation of all of his memories, all his sorrows, all his guilt - and of the other crimes his interrogators have him confess to. Beirut and the legacy of the wars of the Middle East are the texture of Elias Khoury's extraordinary literary achievement.

Why was the corpse of Khalil Ahmad Jaber found in a mound of garbage? Why had this civil servant disappeared weeks before his horrific death? Who was this man? A journalist begins to piece together an answer by speaking with his widow, a local engineer, a watchman, the garbage man who discovered him, the doctor who performed the autopsy, and a young militiaman. Their stories emerge, along with the horrors of Lebanon's bloody civil war and its ravaging effects on the psyches of the survivors. With empathy and candor, Elias Khoury reveals the havoc the war wreaked on Beirut and its inhabitants, as well as the resilience of a people.