Mural - Mahmoud Darwish

Rifqa is Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd’s ode to his late grandmother, and to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. ‘Jerusalem is ours.’ Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba. El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.     Språk: Engelsk Format: Pocket Utgivelsesår: 2021 Antall sider: 97 Forlag: Haymarket Books

A deeply powerful collection of poems about life in Gaza by award-winning Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha. Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid and lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges and his daughter’s joy in eating them. Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination ― even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering. Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, winner of the Palestine Book Award 2022 and the American Book Award 2023

  A pillar of Palestinian literature, "Men in the Sun" is a novella originally published in Arabic in 1962. It follows three Palestinian men, Abu Qais, Assad, and Marwan, as they try to cross the border to Kuwait in an attempt to better provide for their families. In the space of about 70 pages, Kanafani creates very strong and memorable characters whose struggles felt very palpable. The collection also contains five others short stories, "The Land of Sad Oranges" (1958), "If You Were a Horse..."(1961), "A Hand in the Grave" (1962), "The Falcon" (1961), "Letter from Gaza" (1956), and an excerpt from one of his later novels "Umm Saad" (1969). While much shorter in length than "Men in the Sun", all stories are very good at illustrating the plight of their characters. The collection is prefaced by a very informative introduction written by the translator, that sheds light on Kanafani's symbolism from his stories, as well as his political activism and how it translates to his literary works. The three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Under the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun, things grow increasingly oppressive. Breezily conversational and disarmingly lyrical, this short novel delivers a shuddering dose of horror. Collected here alongside the titular novella are six short stories, including the timeless, resonant ‘Letter from Gaza’, Kanafani’s first published work. This collection of important stories by novelist, journalist, teacher, and Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani includes the stunning novella Men in the Sun (1962), the basis of the film The Deceived. Also in the volume are "The Land of Sad Oranges" (1958), "'If You Were a Horse . . .'" (1961), "A Hand in the Grave" (1962), "The Falcon" (1961), "Letter from Gaza" (1956), and an extract from Umm Saad (1969). In the unsparing clarity of his writing, Kanafani offers the reader a gritty look at the agonized world of Palestine and the adjoining Middle East. Born in Acre (northern Palestine) in 1936, Ghassan Kanafani was a major spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and founding editor of its weekly magazine Al- Hadaf. His novels, short stories, and plays have been published in sixteen languages. He was killed in a car-bomb explosion in Beirut in 1972.   Språk: Engelsk Format: Pocket Utgivelsesår: 2025 Antall sider: 97 Forlag: Verso Books