/photo © Jehad Nga: Something in the Way, Iraq, 2010/ I often search for books on Iraq written by reporters who’ve spent a lot of months and years writing, understanding, witnessing – trying to come as close as possible to the truth of it all. Anthony Shadid was one of those reporters. Shadid was a Lebanese-American writer, a foreign […]
/illustration by Ayloul, for the article ‘The Hakawati, a story in pieces‘, The Outpost magazine/ “A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables. A storyteller, and entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns. Like the word ‘hekayah’ story, fable, news, hakawati is derived from the […]
Steven Salaita’s book Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes from and What it Means for Politics Today was published nine years ago and he has had his share of struggles over the last couple of years, but I think this book is worth mentioning over and over again. In the opening chapter of the book, […]
A Tale of Love and Darkness, written by Amos Oz and published ten years ago, finally found its way to the top of my reading list. I am so happy it did. A Tale of Love and Darkness is a memoir by Amos Oz, famous Israeli writer. The memoir recounts the author’s life in the formative […]
I recently read (finally) Siba Shakib’s well-known novel Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep. It is a story about Shirin-Gol, Afghan woman who was just a young girl when her village was levelled by the Russians’ bombs in 1979. We follow her life from her teenage years to her adulthood – going from one refugee […]
Sea of Poppies is a historical novel about 1830’s India, in the midst of blossoming of the opium trade. I’ve been reading a lot about the opium trade these last couple of months, particularly about Afghanistan (I also wrote about it a little), so Sea of Poppies served as my time machine, a ticket to […]
Tamara Chalabi’s Late For Tea At The Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family was the book I was really struggling with. It’s not because the book is poorly written or hard to read (quite the opposite), I was struggling with my inner thoughts and my own opinions of the people Chalabi wrote about, which […]
Betool Khedairi is an Iraqi novelist, born to an Iraqi father and a Scottish mother. She grew up in Iraq, and later on moved between Iraq, Jordan and United Kingdom. A Sky So Close is her first novel, written more than a decade ago. The book has been published in numerous languages, from Arabic to English, […]
Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness Bears No Relation To Hapiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century is the best book I read this year, and it just might be one of my favourite books ever. I read it half a year ago, when it finally found its way through the jungle of air mail, and I […]
Last Sunday, I was strolling around one of Zagreb’s lovely flea markets, spending hours looking at used books, old postcards and perfectly hand-painted china teapots. At the end of my stroll (after I found Isabel Allende’s The House of The Spirits, perfectly preserved, for ten HRK, which would be less than two USD), already tired […]
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