When he was seven years old, Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan moved with his family to a Karameh refugee camp east of the River Jordan. That camp--a center of Palestinian resistance following the Six-Day War and the site of major devastation when Israel razed the camp following the Battle of Karameh in 1968--is the setting for Zaqtan's first prose work to appear in English, Describing the Past.
This novella is a coming of age story, a tale of youth set amid the death and chaos of war and violence. It is an elegy for the loss of a childhood friend, and for childhood itself, brought...

This acclaimed novel is set during the Lebanese Civil War and offers a rare depiction of women's experiences amid this sprawling, region-defining conflict. In Alawiya Sobh's hands, the details of everyday life mix with female voices from across classes, sects, and generations to create an indelible picture of a climate where violence and war are the overt outbreak of a simmering tension that underlies the life in the region. Here, stories struggle to survive the erasure of war and rescue the sweetness of living, trying to connect the tellers and their audience while transforming pain and love...

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, which was founded in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War and the Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party and left political life--and published shortly after she committed suicide--the book offers a poignant look at, and reckoning with, the Marxism of her generation and the role of militant intellectuals in the tragic failure of both the national liberation project and the communist project in Egypt. The powerful critique in The Stillborn...

Gathers 35 years of Iraqi poet Sala Al Hamdani's writings

Novel set primarily amid the political turmoil of 1990s Egypt.