![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Who are your favorite Lebanese writers? Are there any who aren’t as widely translated as they should be? But why? Is it because there is no escape from the horror of our world, which feeds on conflicts and violence? I was hypnotized, bewitched by the beauty of the prose (“From time to time snow tumbled from a branch, as though the branch had just taken a deep breath”), although I knew that it was leading me to something sinister but powerful, a realization of the reality of life and death, echoing similar realizations of mine during the Lebanese civil war. A rare, haunting novel about a village in Catalan whose brutal traditions are tamed and become a natural part of life, to an extent that even when there is a chance for some of its inhabitants to break away from this fatal violence and escape the power of evil they remain tied to it. “The Blue Flower,” by Penelope Fitzgerald “Mothering Sunday,” by Graham Swift “ Autumn,” by Ali Smith “Seven Types of Atheism,” by John Gray “Al-Mawloudah,” by the Egyptian writer Nadia Kamel “Red Birds,” by Mohammed Hanif “Raising Sparks,” by Ariel Kahn. The novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, author most recently of “The Occasional Virgin,” avoids reading books longer than 800 pages “unless they are written by my friends.” ![]()
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