Description |
513 pages ; 25 cm |
Summary |
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories--of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster--are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war--and of survival.--From publisher description |
Subject |
Storytellers -- Fiction.
|
SUBJECT |
Middle East -- Fiction.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008107185
|
Genre/Form |
Fiction.
|
LC no. |
2007035917 |
ISBN |
9780307266798 |
|
0307266796 |
|
9780307386274 |
|
0307386279 |
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