RaveThe Washington PostReading Martyr! is a delight. Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity — through metaphor and with humor that lands.
Khaled Khalifa, trans. by Leri Price
RaveThe Washington PostLush, elegiac ... So much of Khalifa’s work explores varieties of survivorship, and his characters are frequent victims of irony, sudden loss of power and bad luck. The bleak absurdity that mocked Syria’s dysfunction in Death Is Hard Work is distant here, though, exchanged for a fabulist, sometimes maximalist style that bears the stamp of Khalifa’s cited influence ... A novel of abundance and generosity ... Contemporary Syria haunts the novel from beyond its last pages, and as the book skewers the inadequacy of ritual and religious belief, it also asks how to witness and memorialize tragedy.
Isabella Hammad
RaveThe Washington Post\"Fiction has an uneasy relationship with politics, and American writing in particular tends to avoid the Palestinian issue — a problem identified in the text as \'largely a case of preaching to the deaf and to the choir.\' It’s an obstacle Hammad negotiated in her 2019 debut, The Parisian (about British Mandate Palestine), which established her as a writer with an uncanny combination of skills. She is at once able to trace broad social and historical terrains without losing her grasp of particulars, giving a surgical finesse to her writing about the human personality ... You don’t, however, need to be a Shakespeare buff to appreciate this reimagined classic — Mariam and her cast explicitly discuss how malleable the play is in its West Bank setting. The novel is aware of its fourth wall without seeming coy, and the occasional writing in script format is unexpected and exciting. It succeeds, too, in rising beyond a specific ekphrasis to a wider meditation on the exchange between a work of art and its context ... succeeds as that rare fictive project that invites several audiences to pay attention.\
Diana Abu-Jaber
RaveWashington PostBehind its flashy premise full of swords and falconry, Fencing with the King enacts the deft footwork of a veteran novelist reinvigorating a timeless story of rivalry over inheritance with a dash of personal history ... To write fiction about the Palestinian diaspora involves finding ways to acknowledge the fragmentation of exile — usually in the novel’s form, its situation or its characters’ lives. In this case, that fragmentation is embodied by Hafez ... The reader hopes to see Amani discover and resist her uncle’s more nefarious ideas head-on, and the lack of this fuller reckoning is a palpable absence ... I have long admired Abu-Jaber’s craftsmanship ... Food is omnipresent in this story about a sumptuous month-long birthday celebration. Like an intricate recipe, her paragraphs balance interior and external worlds, elegant diction and workmanlike narrative. The effect is a texture of contrasts not unlike the exquisite food at the sheikh’s picnic ... The writing is propulsive — but silkily so, wending on limber paragraphs that allow Abu-Jaber to move with ease across a wide-ranging story that probes conflicted identities ... As Abu-Jaber leans further than ever into her Palestinian American roots to craft this subtle story with the resonance of folklore, she illuminates what has been outstanding about her craft all along.
Garth Stein
PositiveThe OregonianGarth Stein\'s third novel...is a fable with a heart ... it casts a sleeping spell on the readers\' native cynicism and persuades us to dust off old questions about faith and humankind\'s better traits ... Enzo...is a hopeful agnostic, full of platitudes that would sink the novel if they appeared in a human protagonist\'s head. But because Stein\'s guileless writing style persuades us to suspend our disbelief for a canine narrator, he neatly delivers the heart and soul of his story in a philosophy we thought we were tired of hearing. It\'s magic, indeed.
