“This is my story, the story of an Arab woman. It is the story of a lost world. It begins in 1917, in Lebanon, when I was seven years old. So opens this haunting memoir by Wadad Makdisi Cortas, who eloquently describes her personal experience of the events that have fractured the Middle East over […]
Explains the author’s first years of forced exile from her beloved country about the time of her incarceration, the agonising loss of comrades to torture and death in prison, the haunted quality of life so far away from home and family, and the ways in which memory conspires to make us forget what sometimes is […]
“Basrayatha” is a literary tribute by author Muhammad Khudayyir to the city of his birth, Basra, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in southern Iraq. Just as a city’s inhabitants differ from outsiders through their knowledge of its streets and stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and the imagined city he created […]
Alexandre Najjar’s father is celebrated in his legal profession for his rare eloquence. In the courtroom the word is everything, and his work is his life. He is also the father of six children, in whom he instils great fear, imposing military discipline, punishing them severely when they break the rules. Behind this discipline, however, […]
“One of the most poignant testimonies to the Lebanese civil war.”—Moris Farhi As an uneasy peace settles over war-torn Beirut, a woman reflects: Events in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Argentina remind her of the tragedies that shaped her life. What has she achieved in her voluntary exile, and who would she have become if she had […]
This fascinating, intimate and candid biography reveals the intricate realities of the Middle East. Ali Al Jabri was an Arab artist who was murdered in 2002, a violent and lonely end to a life of passionate creativity and a restless search for identity. Ali was stranded between an English education and a struggle to find […]