Most novels are written by professional writers using second hand material. Not this one. Peirene commissioned nine refugees to tell their 'Shatila Stories'. The result is a piece of collaborative fiction unlike any other. If you want to understand the chaos of the Middle East – or you just want to follow the course of a beautiful love story – start here. Adam and his family flee Syria and arrive at the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. Conditions in this overcrowded Palestinian camp are tough, and violence defines many of the relationships: a father fights to save his daughter, a gang leader plots to expand his influence, and drugs break up a family. Adam struggles to make sense of his refugee experience, but then he meets Shatha and starts to view the camp through her eyes. Why Peirene chose to publish this book: I want to hear their stories and see if their imaginations can open up a new path of understanding between us. Collaborative works of literature can achieve what no other literature can do. By pooling our imaginations we are able to access something totally different and new that goes beyond boundaries – that of the individual, of nations, of cultures. It connects us to our common human essence: our creativity. Let's make stories, not more war. 'This remarkable novel isn't about the refugee voice; it is born from it and told through it. On every page, the glint of hope for dignity and a better life is heartbreakingly alive.' Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner 'Both from a humanitarian standpoint and an artistic perspective, Peirene are doing invaluable work in finding new voices who open our eyes, ears and hearts to worldly reality in all its profound suffering, joy, community, isolation and complexity.' Bidisha, Writer and Broadcaster.

The book covers the history of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which took place over three bloody days in the Lebanese capital Beirut. It was committed against Palestinian refugees by Lebanese militias, aided and supervised by the Israeli Army, which had encircled the district.Now available for the first time in English, this classic book is the most comprehensive, authoritative account of what happened and who was responsible. The author, Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, was a Professor at the Lebanese University at the time. Driven by the horror of what occurred, she interviewed survivors and set up an oral history project immediately after the massacre to preserve testimonies. This book is the result. Following a general introduction, the first part contains interviews mainly with victims' families. The second part analyses statistical data and attempts to determine the number of victims. The conclusion, 'Who Was Responsible?', sheds light on the various parties responsible. Over five-hundred pages long, illustrated with photographs and maps, unrivalled in detail and scope, this book is a courageous attempt to make sense of what happened and an important political document in its own right.

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contemporary drone warfare and its related catastrophes, postcolonial ethics in relation to the thanatopolitics of slow violence, dehumanization and the politics of death. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized and diverse acts of violence committed against Muslim communities, I call the postcolonial Muslim world ‘geographies of dehumanization’. The book investigates how ongoing legacies of contemporary forms of injustice and denial of subjecthood are represented, staged and challenged in a range of postcolonial anglophone Muslim texts, thereby questioning the idea of postcolonial ethics. One of the selling points of this book is the chapters on fictional representations by Muslim Myanmar and Uyghur writers as, to the best of my knowledge, no critical work or single authored book is available on Myanmar and Uyghur literature to date.

A heart-wrenching novel explores how several generations of one Palestinian family cope with the loss of their land after the 1948 creation of Israel and their subsequent life in Palestine, which is often marred by war and violence. A first novel. Reprint. Reading-group guide included.

Touch centers on a girl, the youngest of nine sisters in a Palestinian family. In the singular world of this novella, this young woman’s everyday experiences resonate until they have become as weighty as any national tragedy. The smallest sensations compel, the events of history only lurk at the edges--the question of Palestine, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. In a language that feels at once natural and alienated, Shibli breaks with the traditions of modern Arabic fiction, creating a work that has been and will continue to be hailed across literatures. Here every ordinary word, ordinary action is a small stone dropped into water: of inevitable consequence. We find ourselves mesmerized one quiet ripple at a time.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women’s work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their “war stories.” Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.