Rabih Alameddine

In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. As the family gathers, stories begin to unfold: Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching tales are interwoven with classic stories of the Middle East. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the beautiful Fatima; Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders; and a host of mischievous imps. Through Osama, we also enter the world of the contemporary Lebanese men and women whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war, conflicted identity, and survival. With The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century.From the Trade Paperback edition.

"Rabih Alameddine offers a collection of stories that explore the world of Lebanese survivors whom the crises of modernity have made homeless, whether they stayed in Lebanon or joined the diaspora abroad."--BOOK JACKET. "These stories explore the relationships within the traditional Lebanese family when that tradition is shattered by a decade of civil war and then investigate those families we go on to create for ourselves. Daring in style as well as content, these tales focus on what anchors our hearts to the world and to each other."--BOOK JACKET.

"Named by her grandfather after the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt, red-haired Sarah Nour El-Din is feisty, rebellious, individualistic - a person determined to make of her life a work of art. In I, the Divine, she tries to tell her story, sometimes casting it as a memoir, sometimes a novel, full of sly humor and dark realism, always beguilingly incomplete.". "What emerges from these exquisite "first chapters" is extraordinary - a woman and a life as real as any we have known in literature. Raised in a hybrid family shaped by divorce and remarriage, and by Beirut in wartime, Sarah finds a fragile peace in self-imposed exile in the United States. Her vibrant spirit has survived violence, her mother's suicide, her sister's madness, and the impossibility of escaping her family (including her frighteningly entrepreneurial stepmother, who has hired members of Hezbollah to sabotage her competitors). Her extraordinary dignity is supported by a best friend, a grown-up son, sensual pleasures (occasional sex, frequent bubble baths, the company of cats), and her determination to tell her own story."--BOOK JACKET.

Detailing the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the Lebanese civil war in Beirut on a circle of friends and family during the eighties and nineties, Koolaids mines the chaos of contemporary experience, telling the stories of characters who can no longer love or think except in fragments. Clips, quips, vignettes and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, conversations with both the quick and the dead, all shine their combined lights to reveal the way we experience life today.

"Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis"-- "Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them."--

Aaliya Saleh, 72 ans, les cheveux bleus, a toujours refusé les carcans imposés par la société libanaise. A l'ombre des murs anciens de son appartement, elle s'apprête pour son rituel préféré. Chaque année, le 1er janvier, après avoir allumé deux bougies pour Walter Benjamin, cette femme irrévérencieuse et un brin obsessionnelle commence à traduire en arabe l'une des oeuvres de ses romanciers préférés : Kafka, Pessoa ou Nabokov. A la fois refuge et "plaisir aveugle", la littérature est l'air qu'elle respire, celui qui la fait vibrer comme cet opus de Chopin qu'elle ne cesse d'écouter. C'est entourée de livres, de cartons remplis de papiers, de feuilles volantes de ses traductions qu'Aaliya se sent vivante. Cheminant dans les rues, Aaliya se souvient ; de l'odeur de sa librairie, des conversations avec son amie Hannah, de ses lectures à la lueur de la bougie tandis que la guerre faisait rage, de la ville en feu, de l'imprévisibilité de Beyrouth. Roman éblouissant à l'érudition joueuse, célébrant la beauté et la détresse de Beyrouth, Les Vies de papier est une véritable déclaration d'amour à la littérature. (Payot.ch)

"Aaliya Sohbi lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family's 'unnecessary appendage.' Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read-- by anyone. After overhearing her neighbors, 'the three witches,' discussing her too-white hair, Aaliya accidentally dyes her hair too blue. In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman's late-life crisis, readers follow Aaliya's digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Colorful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya's own volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left" --