• White Masks
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Archipelago Books

White Masks

White Masks

by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Maia Tabet

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Why was the corpse of Khalil Ahmad Jaber found in a mound of garbage? Why had this civil servant disappeared weeks before his horrific death? Who was this man? A journalist begins to piece together an answer by speaking with his widow, a local engineer, a watchman, the garbage man who discovered him, the doctor who performed the autopsy, and a young militiaman. Their stories emerge, along with the horrors of Lebanon’s bloody civil war and its ravaging effects on the psyches of the survivors. With empathy and candor, Elias Khoury reveals the havoc the war wreaked on Beirut and its inhabitants, as well as the resilience of a people.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780981987323
Pages: 303
Publication Date:

Praise

Elias Khoury is a pure storyteller. A writer who understands the hypnotic power of words, and who lets this power become the actual subject of his books. Of course, alongside the words, there is reality, palpable, sensuous, atrocious.
—Le Nouvel Observateur

How to write Beirut? . . . with words and images that stumble with weariness, that collapse from the heat, from the stone which composes them only to crumble in turn? . . . This is why Khoury's fiction is so powerful. The intent of the writing is to restore the soul.
—Tahar Ben Jelloun

No Lebanese writer has been more successful than Elias Khoury in telling the story of Lebanon . . . Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world.
—Washington Post Book World

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