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A powerful novel of a young man living between Muslim and Christian worlds amid the Lebanese Civil War. Firefly paints a searing portrait of the city of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1970s, as seen through the eyes of its simple, yet perplexing, protagonist, Nizam al-Alami. On Nizam's national ID card, no religion is listed. Muslim by birth, he is Christian by baptism. As a young boy, he found his way into an orchard while playing, and its owners, Touma and Rakheema, instantly fell for him and agreed to raise him as their own, as a Christian, without much resistance from his Muslim parents. When he is grown, Nizam makes his way to Beirut to study law. Unable to bear the confines of the classroom, he abandons college to explore the city as he pleases. His apartment soon becomes a meeting place for his communist comrades, and he falls in love with Janan, the tormented artist whose dark paintings prophesy the city's bloody future. When Beirut explodes, and the city is divided into a Christian East and a Muslim West, Nizam's apartment turns into a hideout for armed militiamen, and Burj Square is emptied of everything except the Martyrs' Statue that bears witness to the city's most difficult moments. Nizam, too, bears witness, as he sees the corpses of the civil war's victims pile up. Jabbour Douaihy takes us through Nizam's adventures and struggles as he faces stigmatization, homelessness, and violence in a society that considers him an outsider. Like the light-producing, charismatic fireflies that captured his imagination and eluded him as a child, Nizam is the glimmer of hope epitomized by those who reject binary identities in favor of the in-between. But how long, Douaihy asks, can this glimmer of hope truly last?

A love letter to a city of his childhood, Jabbour Douaihy's The American Quarter is set in a small neighborhood in Tripoli, the ancient port on the northern coast of Lebanon. Unfolding at the height of the US-led invasion of Iraq, it revolves around the radicalization of an ordinary youth named Ismail. But Ismail's story is part of a larger portrait of those nearest to him: the young disabled brother he looks out for; his father Bilal, a massacre survivor; Intisar, his spirited, indulgent mother, a maid like her mother before her in the wealthy, powerful Azzam household; Abdelkarim, the Azzam family's only son, addicted to poetry and opera, and pining for his lost Polish ballerina?all sharply depicted by Douaihy with irony and affection. As well, Ismail's fate is entwined with the disappointments and meager prospects of those around him in the deteriorating American Quarter, and others forced to crisscross the surrounding conflict-scarred lands. Somehow Ismail's reckoning with his assigned mission comes to reflect our own struggles--for redemption, for faith in life in the face of destructive forces that can erase in an instant what is dear to us. A classic tale for our time, in a lucid translation by Paula Haydar, The American Quarter is a compassionate work of great beauty. Paying homage to the persistent presence of a beloved old city and her people, it bolsters us with a gifted writer's long view of the threats to trust and tolerance we now face.

"Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."--Laila Lalami, " Los Angeles Times" From the author of "Gate of the Sun "and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab World" ("The Washington Post Book World") comes the many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice. Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, "Little Gandhi "becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Once again, as John Leonard wrote in "Harper's Magazine," Elias Khoury "fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."

"City Gates" was first published in Arabic in 1981, and in English in 1993. It is a further exploration of the themes of exile, dislocation, and identity. Elias Khoury's early works show him finding the distinctive voice that explodes in his epic "Gate of the Sun."
A stranger arrives at the gates of a city from which everyone appears to have fled. The once besieged and now deserted city is Beirut. "City Gates" is a fable of displacement and a visionary tale about the consequences of civil war in the Middle East.

Rashid al-Daif's provocative novel Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep? takes an intimate look at the life of a recently married Lebanese man. Rashoud and his wife struggle as they work to negotiate not only their personal differences but also rapidly changing attitudes toward sex and marriage in Lebanese culture. As their fragile bond disintegrates, Rashoud finds television playing a more prominent role in his life; his wife uses the presence of a television at her parents' house as an excuse to spend time away from her new home. Rashoud purchases a television in the hopes of luring his wife back home, but in a pivotal scene, he instead finds himself alone watching Kramer vs. Kramer. Without the aid of subtitles, he struggles to make sense of the film, projecting his wife's behavior onto the character played by Meryl Streep, who captivates him but also frightens him in what he sees as an effort to take women's liberation too far.

Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep? offers a glimpse at evolving attitudes toward virginity, premarital sex, and abortion in Lebanon and addresses more universal concerns such as the role of love and lust in marriage. The novel has found wide success in Arabic and several European languages and has also been dramatized in both Arabic and French.