Hala Alyan is een bekroonde Palestijns-Amerikaanse dichteres en romanschrijfster wier werk zich verdiept in thema's als identiteit, herinnering en familie. Haar schrijven wordt gekenmerkt door scherpe inzichten in de complexiteit van menselijke relaties en het innerlijke leven van haar personages. Alyan onderzoekt de kruispunten van persoonlijke en collectieve geschiedenissen, waarbij ze vaak een lyrische en suggestieve stijl hanteert. Haar onderscheidende stem creëert diep resonerende verhalen die de inherente kwetsbaarheid en kracht van de menselijke ervaring onthullen.
From the award-winning author of Salt Houses, a rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home
Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR * Nylon * Kirkus Reviews * Bustle * BookPage "Moving and beautifully written." -- Entertainment Weekly On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses follows three generations of a Palestinian family and asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again. " Alyan is] a master." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "Beautiful . . . An example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us." -- NPR "Gorgeous and sprawling . . . Heart-wrenching, lyrical and timely." -- Dallas Morning News " Salt Houses] illustrate s] the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter." -- New York Times Book Review
This landmark anthology gathers together almost two-hundred vibrant English-language love poems by living writers of Arab descent. We Call to the Eye and to the Night is an amalgam of eminent poets —Hayan Charara, Leila Chatti, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among them—and those who have just begun to make their mark. These poets are descended from diverse countries and represent a breathtaking intersection of voices, experiences, and perspectives. Divided into whimsical sections (named for lines from poems they include), the anthology features an evocative array of erotic and romantic selections, as well as ones portraying love of family, friends, heritage, and homeland. Exquisitely curated and introduced by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, We Call to the Eye and to the Night is at once sexy, sensuous, adventurous, and nostalgic—a treasury of love emanating from the Arab world and its diaspora.
From the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family-past, present, future-in the face of displacement and war. A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection--a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form--small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement. These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body--and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?