Sabra Zoo

Sabra Zoo
Author: Mischa Hiller
Publisher: Saqi
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2011-10-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1846591023

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for Europe and South Asia. "A stunning, defiant debut."— Guardian "Hiller brings to his works not only a craftsman's skill but also a compassion for his characters that proves infectious."— Haaretz "A chilling rites-of-passage novel set in Beirut in 1982 during the killings in the camps."— The Economist It is the summer of 1982 and Beirut is under siege. Eighteen-year-old Ivan's parents have just been evacuated from the city with other members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Ivan stays on, interpreting for international medical volunteers in Sabra refugee camp and working undercover for the PLO. Hoping to get closer to Eli, a Norwegian physiotherapist, he helps her treat Youssef, a camp orphan disabled by a cluster bomb. An unexpected friendship develops between the three and things begin to look up. But events take a nasty turn when the president-elect is assassinated. The Israeli army enters Beirut and surrounds the camp, with Eli and Youssef trapped inside. What happens next makes international headlines and leaves Ivan scrabbling to salvage something positive from the chaos. Mischa Hiller, of English–Palestinian descent, was born in England in 1962 and grew up in London, Dar es Salaam, and Beirut. Mischa won the 2009 European Independent Film Festival script competition for his adaptation of Sabra Zoo. He lives with his family in Cambridge, England.

Shake Off

Shake Off
Author: Mischa Hiller
Publisher: Mulholland Books
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2012-08-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316204226

An internationally acclaimed thriller of love, espionage and subterfuge, in which Middle East meets West with dangerous consequences. Years of training have transformed Michel Khoury into a skilled intelligence operative. A refugee whose family was murdered by extremists, he has one mission: the peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict that upended his life. An alluring enigma, he attracts the attention of Helen, a pretty English girl who lives in the adjacent apartment. As their relationship develops, Michel is unable to tell Helen about his past -- or the collection of passports and unmarked bills he's concealed in the bathroom they share. When Michel's secrets turn deadly, Helen and Michel find themselves pursued through the streets of London, Berlin and the Scottish countryside, on the run from the very people they thought they could trust. A critically celebrated novel that "recalls the cool detachment and compelling eye for ordinary detail that characterized the early thrillers of Graham Greene" (Independent on Sunday), Shake Off is that rare breed of riveting tale -- of intrigue and suspense, love and betrayal -- that announces a bold new voice for our increasingly global times.

The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism

The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism
Author: Caroline Rooney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135136521

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores literary representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media including film and art. The book investigates and promotes an awareness of an ethics of representation on questions of extreme emotional investment, comparing representations of the siege to representations of other traumatic events, visiting responses from those of different cultural backgrounds to the same event and considering implications with respect to comparative approaches. Chapters explore how literature, journalism and art contribute to overcoming the dangers of forgetting and denial, memorial excess and fundamentalism, the radicalization of violence, and the complete breakdown of trust on international levels, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities. The book extends the use of postcolonial methodologies affiliated with history, international relations, and psychoanalysis (memory, trauma) to Middle-Eastern studies, and visits the siege’s effect on different forms of memory and memorialization: selective memory, trauma, gaps and fissures in historical accounts, recording of eyewitness reports, and artistic re-imaginings and realizations of alternative archives.

Arab Cultural Studies

Arab Cultural Studies
Author: Anastasia Valassopoulos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317981049

This book seeks to both showcase and further develop innovative research and debates on contemporary Arab cultural production. Popular culture in the form of cinema, popular music, literature, visual media and cyber-cultures, both local and imported, enjoy a central role in Arab cultural life, and the contributors to this innovative collection showcase the tremendous cultural output emerging from the Arab world. They present sensitive, conceptual readings whilst remaining mindful of the place of this work within a wider framework that seeks to prevent isolationist readings of cultural phenomena. Making sense of the place of culture in the Arab world, and agreeing upon a broadly recognisable and commonly accepted set of terms within which to discuss this output, is a new and urgent challenge. Arab Cultural Studies aspires to understand, communicate and theorise these forms. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

Disengaged

Disengaged
Author: Mischa Hiller
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1780106041

Hadfish Systems in London are technological experts - but are they prepared to be caught up in a deadly game of international intelligence? Julian and his business partner, Rami, run Hadfish Systems, a successful software development company. When Rami is offered the chance of a lucrative new contract, he doesn’t seem too fussed about where the money is coming from or for what purposes the software might be used. Julian, though, has concerns, made all the more relevant by some secrets he’s been hiding, even from the people closest to him. When an old acquaintance of Julian’s reappears unexpectedly, full of promises and threats, Julian wonders whether this contract is really so lucrative after all, or whether it’s simply a chance to save his own life. Caught between warring nations and competing interests, old secrets and new loyalties, Julian is trapped in a deadly game ...

Seeking Palestine

Seeking Palestine
Author: Penny (ed.) Johnson
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1623710413

How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written? In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writers—essayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoirists—respond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. Their contributions—poignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely political—make for an offering that is remarkable for the candor and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Susan Abulhawa, Suad Amiry, Rana Barakat, Mourid Barghouti, Beshara Doumani, Sharif S. Elmusa, Rema Hammami, Mischa Hiller, Emily Jacir, Penny Johnson, Fady Joudah, Jean Said Makdisi, Karma Nabulsi, Raeda Sa’adeh, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli.

Wild Thorns

Wild Thorns
Author: Salar Khalifeh
Publisher: Saqi Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2023-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0863569471

In this tense modern literary classic, acclaimed Palestinian author Sahar Khalifeh depicts the humiliation, bitter resignation and determined resistance of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. First published in 1976, Wild Thorns was the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of everyday life under Israeli occupation. With uncompromising honesty, Khalifeh pleads elegantly for survival in the face of oppression.

Spiritual Homelands

Spiritual Homelands
Author: Asher D. Biemann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2019-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110637561

Homeland, Exile, Imagined Homelands are features of the modern experience and relate to the cultural and historical dilemmas of loss, nostalgia, utopia, travel, longing, and are central for Jews and others. This book is an exploration into a world of boundary crossings and of desired places and alternate identities, into a world of adopted kin and invented allegiances.

Understanding War

Understanding War
Author: Christian P. Potholm
Publisher: UPA
Total Pages: 720
Release: 2016-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0761867740

The third book in Professor Christian Potholm’s war trilogy (which includes Winning at War and War Wisdom), Understanding War provides a most workable bibliography dealing with the vast literature on war and warfare. As such, it provides insights into over 3000 works on this overwhelmingly extensive material. Understanding War is thus the most comprehensive annotated bibliography available today. Moreover, by dividing war material into eighteen overarching themes of analysis and fifty seminal topics, and focusing on these, Understanding War enables the reader to access and understand the broadest possible array of materials across both time and space, beginning with the earliest forms of warfare and concluding with the contemporary situation. Stimulating and thought-provoking, this volume is essential for an understanding of the breadth and depth of the vast scholarship dealing with war and warfare through human history and across cultures.

Sabra and Shatila

Sabra and Shatila
Author: Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout
Publisher: Pluto Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2004-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN:

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.