Then, she looked at me assiduously, “What is it that you do exactly?” I replied, savoring my last sip of coffee, with all the sass of a gypsy, “A novelist.” How to write a novel? Where to find inspiration? What is it that novels do for us? What is the nature of love? And most importantly, how and where to find it? Embarking on a literary and romantic journey, an aspiring novelist guides the reader through the streets of Damascus to bookstores, libraries, historical landmarks, cafés, and neighborhoods that carry the traces of history and the possibilities of the future. Mining the rich and divergent histories, narratives, texts, memories, and people that occupy the narrator’s mind and everyday life, Writing Love casts a critical eye on contemporary society and offers a playful testament to the tangential nature of writing and the many ways to fall in love. Writing Love was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
Writing Love
A Syrian Novel
Khalil Sweileh
Translated byAlexa Firat
25 June 2012
192 pp.
15X23cm
ISBN 9789774165351
For sale worldwide
$16.95
Related products
Butterfly Wings
An Egyptian Novel
Mohamed SalmawyTranslated by Raphael Cohen
A chance encounter on a plane throws together Doha, a fashion designer unhappily married to a leading figure in the Mubarak regime, and Ashraf, an academic and leading dissident. The story of their relationship and Doha’s self-discovery runs alongside a young Egyptian’s search for the mother he never knew, and these intersecting narratives unfold against the background of political protests that culminate in the overthrow of the regime. A moving and at times humorous story, Butterfly Wings is an extended allegory of Egypt’s modern experience of authoritarian rule and explores the fractures and challenges of a society at the moment of revolutionary transformation. Mohamed Salmawy’s almost prophetic novel was first published in Arabic immediately prior to the events of 25 January 2011, and has been celebrated as ‘the novel that predicted the Revolution.’ First published in Arabic in 2011 by al-Dar al-Misriya al-Libnaniya as Ajnihat al-farasha.
...read more
1 July 2014
Paperback
176 pp.12.5X20cm
$16.95
Cell Block Five
An Iraqi Novel
Fadhil al-AzzawiTranslated byWilliam M. Hutchins
Being plucked from a Baghdad café and deposited in a cell block for political prisoners is a wakeup call for Aziz, the novel’s hero and narrator, a young man who has been living on automatic pilot—as if he were a guest visiting his own life—and he is finally forced to come to terms with the flawed world we inhabit and shape. Although never charged with any offense, he must adjust to a lengthy stay in prison, where he is befriended by Salam the yard boss, Mun‘im an idealistic university student with a beautiful sister named Salwa, Yusuf an idealist dispatched to the ‘Swamp,’ Salman an anarchist schoolteacher, and Mustafa an aged farmer who dreams of an alternative society. While these imprisoned revolutionaries teach Aziz to dream that an ideal city with his name on it may lie just over the horizon, the police supervisor encourages him to think of a simple crime to which he can confess so he can be charged and eventually released. Based on the author’s own incarceration in Iraq, Cell Block Five is a clear-headed, good-humored tribute to the prison’s men—both the inmates and the guards—and an indictment of man’s gratuitous inhumanity to man, pointing out that the transition from abused to abuser, tortured to torturer, can be an easy one. Written in 1971 and published outside Iraq in 1972, Cell Block Five—the first Iraqi prison novel—was later made into a feature film in Syria. Drawing the reader subtly into the political section of an Iraqi prison, this compelling story easily transcends cultural boundaries.
...read more
15 September 2013
Paperback
116 pp.12.5X20cm
$14.95
Absent
Betool KhedairiTranslated byMuhayman Jamil
Absent tells the story of Dalal, a young Iraqi woman living with the childless aunt and uncle who raised her. Dalal and her neighbors try to maintain normal lives, despite the crippling effect of bombings and international sanctions resulting from the first Gulf War. By turns affectionate, wry, and darkly comic, Absent paints a moving portrait of people struggling to get by in impossible circumstances. Upstairs, the fortune-teller Umm Mazin offers her customers cures for their physical and romantic ailments; below, Saad the hairdresser attends to a dwindling number of female customers; and on the second floor, the nurse Ilham dreams of her long-lost French mother to escape the grim realities she sees in the children’s ward at the hospital. With memories of happier times during the “Days of Plenty” of her childhood, Dalal falls in love for the first time against a background of surprise arrests, personal betrayals, and a crumbling social fabric that turns neighbors into informants. Tightly crafted and skillfully told, Absent is a haunting portrait of life under sanctions, the fragile emotional ties between individuals, and, ultimately, the resilience of the human spirit.
...read more
Paperback
224 pp.15X23cm
$18.95
A Tunisian Tale
Hassouna MosbahiTranslated byMax Weiss
After ne’er-do-wells spread rumors about a widowed mother’s weak moral character among the people of a slum on the outskirts of Tunis that festers with migrants who have come to the metropolis from the heartland in search of a better life, her twenty-year-old son takes matters into his own hands and commits an unspeakable crime. An imaginative and disturbing novel told from the alternating viewpoints of this unrepentant sociopath, as he sits and fumes on death row but willingly guides us through his juvenile exploits and twisted memories, and his murdered mother, who calmly gives an account of her interrupted life from beyond the grave, A Tunisian Tale introduces the narrative talents of Hassouna Mosbahi to an English-language audience for the first time, as he confronts both taboos of Tunisian society and the boundaries of conventional storytelling.
...read more
30 January 2016
Paperback
152 pp.15X23cm
$14.95