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published January 2008
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In Khoury’s new novel, the reader is propelled into a fantastic universe of skewed reality and violent abandon. We follow the path of a young man, Yalo, who is growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the long years of the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother who “lost her face in the mirror,” he falls in with a dangerous gang whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a frightening reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned. He is forced to confess to crimes of which he has no recollection. As he writes and rewrites his confession, he begins to grasp his family’s past, recalling all that his psyche has buried, and the true Yalo begins to emerge.
Visit the Gate of the Sun page to read praise for Khoury’s body of work and interviews with the author.
Elias Khoury’s Yalo is a novel that transcends—as only art can—the deep divisiveness of ideology, both political and religious. Yalo speaks to our universal humanity, to our profound longing for a realization of self and a connection to others. That such a vision should, at this moment in history, come to the American reading public from a great Arab novelist makes this an extraordinarily important publishing event.
"—Robert Olen ButlerYalo establishes Khoury as the sort of novelist whose name is inseparable from a city. 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 Book Review
An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.
"—Guy DavenportOne of the best-kept secrets in of modern French prose.
"—Publishers Weekly
The pacing and perspective of Bosman’s tales...are unlike anything else in English...The closest comparison may be Robert Frost poems or Bob Dylan songs.
"—Publishers WeeklyIn the wild-dog reserves, up where South Africa meets the Botswana border, every guest-house room has a leather-bound copy of short stories by the teacher-killer-writer, Herman Charles Bosman.
"—Peter Stothard, Times Literary Supplement Online
Heine possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection… And how he employs German! It will one be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language.
"—Friedrich Nietzsche
In the euphonious movement of its prose, in the sublimity and beauty of the figures that appear in it, it makes an impression upon me similar to the beat of the waves of the troubled sea. Indeed, this prose is music, soft melting sounds interrupted by painful dissonances, finally expiring in dark, uncanny dirges.
"—Friedrich NietzscheBut if there were words in which to grasp the relation between myth and the inner life from which the later poem sprang it would be those of Hölderlin. 'Myths, which take leave of the earth, / ... They return to mankind.'
"—Walter Benjamin
The greatest novel ever written about Istanbul.
"—Orhan PamukEvery page is full of sharp insights into human nature, delivered with a linguistic confidence that cracks like a whip and warms one from the inside with a glow of recognition—the recognition that no matter how far away we think we might be from one another in time and space, we are all distilled from the very same mixture of passion and compassion, intelligence and foolishness.
"—Ugur Akinci
Ponge, to be sure, forfeits no resource of language, natural or unnatural. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention.
"—James Merrill
The jazz scenes crackle with energy and authority...Coulson moves fluidly between the past and the present, and the novel is ultimately quiet, affecting and redemptive.
"—Publishers Weekly
The Great Weaver from Kashmir
Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the saga’s shadow…to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland—he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity.
"—The Guardian