Books and writing references

This is the story of a small Lebanese village that only included a few tourist shops until families gradually settled during the civil war, and of its multi-confessional inhabitants.

The shape of this book allows multiple readings through the various possible ways to unfold a series of three times five strips, each dedicated to the occupant of a building, the building where the author spent her childhood, all together forming a community of neighbours, their daily life and light conflicts.

During the 1980s, 10 year’ old Ruba living in her family home in a village outside Beirut watches the civil war tearing Lebanon apart.

This novel shows how the Lebanese continue to love their country despite the violence and fear they experienced during the war.

Lebanon war stories carrying the cries of the destitute and oppressed.

'The pains and ravages of civil war. A man wanders the labyrinths of Beirut out of the past and through the present into an uncertain future, following a trajectory much like that of the city itself. The problems of memory and forgetting, the linguistic and cultural struggles that have exploded the city for the past fifteen years.'

This book is born from a performance that took place in Beyrouth in April 2009. Jacques Jouet wrote and Zeina Abirache drew live with an audience, during 24 hours, 24 episodes of this story set in a war-torn city.

The main character of this novel is crippled and tries to find the reasons for his handicap in the war.

Emigration of Lebanese families after the Israeli attack in 1982.

The author tells the story, beyond the ghost of the war, of the life of his characters; inhabitants of a village close to Beirut where Mar Nohra is known to be the saint who cures eye diseases.

Collection of short stories detailing the complexities of contemporary Arab life. Tenuously poised between the cultures of the East and the West.

The anguish of parents whose children are touched by the 'contagion of emigration', before and because of the Civil Lebanese war.

A novel set against war-torn Beirut.

An account of the Lebanese war and its analysis through worried and upset characters.

a series of short 'portraits' of the civil war, based, in part, on Khoury's own experiences.

A story of love and resi­s­tance between South Lebanon, Beirut and London told from the perspec­tive of a female narrator.

A dead man who does not look like a combattant, but like a musician….

Five Stories, each one about a theater actor…

This collection relates events linked to the civil war in Lebanon through short stories born from a combination of truth and fiction.

On a cold winter day in Montreal, an immigrant thief is rescued from committing suicide and has to attend therapy sessions, leading us back to his violent childhood in a war-torn country, then into his current immigrant life-on-the-edge, where he sees himself as a cockroach invading the lives of others.

The events of the last week spent by a young Lebanese woman in Lebanon before fleeing to Dubai.

An emotional story of war and violence in Lebanon.

This story of two young people, a boy and a girl, with Russian mothers, at the outbreak of Lebanon’ July 2006 war, who flee to Moscow and bond on their way there, portrays Lebanon’s taboos surrounding gender, sexual, religious, and national identities.

This story of 3 very different young women, Abeer, Jana, and Yasmine, attending a Beirut university, explores a specific Lebanese milieu and demonstrates how confused one may become because of naming, desire, identity, and branding issues.

In a novel combining fiction and the history of Arab migrations to the Americas, the author tells the story a group of Syrian-Lebanese who emigrated to the United States on the eve of WW1.

In a novel combining fiction and the history of Arab migrations to the Americas, the author tells the story a group of Syrian-Lebanese who emigrated to the United States on the eve of WW1.

A story illustrating Beirut's fractioned society and identities.

This novel depicts the portrait of a reclusive woman and her visions of past and present Beirut, describing her memories of the civil war in Lebanon and her own life.

A novel about the homosexuality amongst women in the Middle-Eastern society where they already are considered as being inferior -so how dare they show another flaw?!-. A subject that also attacks this male society showing the inability of men to satisfy women.

The story of Milia depicts the profound conflicts of the 1947 Arab World: in order to “hide away” from her new husband and society, she lives in a dream-world where she converses with the dead and foresees the future, until this parallel realm becomes more familiar and easy to live with than "reality", and both become increasingly entangled.

A child in south Lebanon after the Israeli Invasion

"One day, images came to my mind… I picked them in the language they came in and wrote them down serenely. I did not consider myself a writer, and thought that idea funny, stupid…"

Torn between religious faith and love, Asma drives the reader through a war-torn country, Lebanon.

This is the diary of a young man who returns from his college in the United States to his Lebanese village, and tries to adjust to his environment, and even to redefine himself, faced with his new reality and the people in his village, far from his college years.

A “novelized biography” by Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif and and the riposte of German novelist Joachim Helfer demonstrating how attitudes toward sex and masculinity across cultural contexts are intertwined with the work of fiction, thereby highlighting the importance of fantasy in understanding the Other”; Rashid al-Daif talks about his encounter with gay Joachim Helfer, highlighting that the HIV virus is more widely-spread in gay communities, and not missing an opportunity to claim his heterosexuality loud and clear and say that life without women is colorless. This book also includes essays by specialists in Arabic and German literature shedding light on the discourse around sex between the two authors from different cultural contexts.

The story of three persons living between post-war Beirut and Paris: a daughter travelling, a mother remembering, and a doctor who can’t find his lost brother.

The adventures of Farid in Beirut -a city he had never been to before- with good people he meets on his way, throughout his journey.

A man dying, scared of death listens to his son telling him how easy it is, as if he were not afraid of his own death.

"At the end of the first day, we all prayed and went to bed. I cannot describe the first night we spent in the convent; I slept alone in a bed. It was the first time this had ever happened to me. I used to sleep in my mother’s bed on the floor. Her warmth was enough for me, even during the coldest nights. I did not feel warm during that night, even though it was summer. I stayed awake the whole night, almost shivering. Was it the cold? No, it was this fast travel in time: In one day, I had crossed a distance equal to many years, I had crossed the distance and the time period between the gas lamp and the electric lamp. Can this happen in a few hours?"

During the last days of the Lebanese Civil War, a young lebanese man dying, writes a letter to Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese novelist who won the 1968 Nobel Prize for literature and killed himslef in 1972; creating/imagining a dialogue with him about dying, free will and the value of memory.

During the last days of the Lebanese Civil War, a young lebanese man dying, writes a letter to Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese novelist who won the 1968 Nobel Prize for literature and killed himslef in 1972; creating/imagining a dialogue with him about dying, free will and the value of memory.

This novel tells the story of four women living in the same Beirut apartment during the civil war, and their daily struggles, each one having to deal with her personal problems.

This novel tells the story of four women living in the same Beirut apartment during the civil war, and their daily struggles, each one having to deal with her personal problems.

This novel tells the story of four women living in the same Beirut apartment during the civil war, and their daily struggles, each one having to deal with her personal problems.

In an almost disused hospital of the Chatila camp in Lebanon, the narrator, in order to revive his spiritual father -a hero of the Palestinian resistance- from a coma, relates the Lebanese Civil War that has just ended, the most important events of his own existence and the often painful stories of men and women snatched by History after their expulsion from Palestine in 1948.

A novel including chapters relating stories set in Palestine, Lebanon and Baghdad, all three sharing the war experience…

This novel portrays exile and identity through the story of a man who left Lebanon in 1984 during the civil war at the age of 18, and came back at age 33.

The problems and hopes of a part of this Lebanese society attached to their torn country, refusing to let go of real life and hide out in the unreal world of arms, or the false world of exile.

Two neighbors, a man and a woman, both refugees, who acquaintance develops into friendship then into a kind of love mirroring life in Lebanon, a love that lives by the day…

Through the stories of five characters who discover, in Beirut, they are victims of corruption, class discrimination and blind allegiance to tradition, the author defines the struggles of the Lebanese society, depicting prophetically the social and political causes of the Lebanese civil war in 1975.