Blogs in February 2020

Ports of Call 22nd February 2020

Ossyane, a young Lebanese of both aristocratic Ottoman and humble Armenian origins, goes to Montpellier, France, to study away from the burden of his liberal father’s revolutionary ambitions. World War II breaks out and Ossyane is drawn into the...

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The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story 22nd February 2020

In a masterly act of literary transformation, Hanan al-Shaykh re-creates the dramatic life of her mother, Kamila, in Kamila’s own voice. And so we see 1930s Beirut through the eyes of the unschooled but irrepressibly spirited ten-year-old child who...

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Waltz With Bashir: A Lebanon War Story 22nd February 2020

One night in Beirut in September 1982, while Israeli soldiers secured the area, Christian militia members entered the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and began to massacre hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians. Ari Folman was one of...

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Little Mountain 22nd February 2020

Written in the opening phases of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), Little Mountain is told from the perspectives of three characters: a Joint Forces fighter; a distressed civil servant; and an amorphous figure, part fighter, part intellectual. Elias Khoury’s...

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Yalo: A Novel 22nd February 2020

Award-winning author Elias Khoury’s latest novel is a searing look at truth and memory, love and trancendence, told through the contradictory confessions of a young Lebanese prisoner During the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, a young man is...

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