Writers from Alice Walker to Michael Ondaatje to Claire Messud share their thoughts on one of the most vital gatherings of writers and readers in the world.The Palestine Festival of Literature was established in 2008 by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Brigid Keenan, Victoria Brittain and Omar Robert Hamilton. Bringing writers to Palestine from all corners of the globe, it aimed to break the cultural siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation, to strengthen artistic lin...

In Hello Everybody! a bestseller in his native Holland, Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five yearsas a reporter in the Middle East. Young and inexperienced but fluent in Arabic, he speaks to stone throwers and soldiers, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors chronicling first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation and war. But the more he witnesses, the less he understands and he becomes increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he sees on the gr...

Over the summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Through reported conversations she creates a vivid picture of life in this coastal fragment of self-governing Palestine. Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enj...

How did Syria’s revolution reach this its current boiling point? And what’s next? This updated edition of My House in Damascus offers an insider’s view on these questions and the darker recesses of Syria’s history, politics, and society.Diana Darke, a fluent Arabic speaker who moved to Damascus in 2004 after decades of regular visits, details how the Assad regime, and its relationship to the people, differs from the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya—and why it was thus ...

A mix of memoir and history offering "a nuanced, unflinching look at the Israeli dream of the kibbutz and its demise . . . darkly comic . . . utterly engrossing" (Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving).The word "Israel" today sparks images of walls and rockets and a bloody conflict without end. Yet for decades, the symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer making the desert bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So whatever happened to the dream of...

"A curious, often amusing travelogue of [Sardar's] quest for understanding and the Muslims he has encountered along his journeys."— Publishers WeeklyZiauddin Sardar, one of the foremost Muslim intellectuals in Britain, learned the Koran at his mother's knee in Pakistan. As a young student in London he set out to grasp the meaning of his religion, and, hopefully, to find "paradise," his quest leading him throughout the Muslim world, from Iran to China to Tu...

Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys into Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with her customary curiosity, her acute ear and mind, her empathy, her openness to the experience and her moral seriousness. Behind the book lies a desire to communicate the reality of life on the g...

These twenty-one personal stories are told by women from practically all backgrounds and persuasions—devout and not-so devout, professionals and housewives, westernized and traditional, wearing jeans, hijab, or niqab, straight and gay, and originally from Africa, North America, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia—revealing in their own ways what it means to them to be a Muslim woman (a “Muslimah”). What we get is a complex of stories, all challenging conventions and stereotypes, and...

For much of her life—like many Westerners—most of what Pamela Olson knew of the Middle East was informed by headlines and stereotypes. But when she traveled to Palestine in 2003, she found herself thrown with dizzying speed into the realities of Palestinian life.Fast Times in Palestine is Olson's powerful, deeply moving account of life in Palestine-both the daily events that are universal to us all (house parties, concerts, barbecues, and ...

"The biology of Israel/Palestine simply and beautifully revealed," from the author of Down and Out Today: Notes from the Gutter (Jon Snow, journalist and presenter).Writer Matthew Small traveled to the Holy Land to further his understanding of the enduring conflict between Israel and Palestine. While there, he discovered beauty, fear and suffering like nowhere else in the world. In these honest and evocative reflections, Small retells his experiences of cr...

In Syria, culture has become the critical line of defence against tyranny. Villagers have joined the cultural frontline alongside urban intellectuals, artists, writers and filmmakers and to create art and literature that challenge official narratives. With contributions by over fifty artists and writers, both established and emerging, Syria Speaks explores the explosion of creativity and free expression by the Syrian people. They have become their own publishers on the Internet and formed ...

Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri was born in the Iraqi holy city of Karbala, sacred to the whole Muslim world. Educated in Europe, living in the USA, working for many years in the oil industry, he has developed a unique perspective on the social and political history of the region. Interwoven with episodes from his own life, and meetings with prominent politicians, theologians and Sufi masters, he traces the collapse of the old way of life as dictators, often propped up by western c...