Here’s an excerpt from a recent Bookforum feature on Elias Khoury, editor of the literary supplement of al-Nahar newspaper in Beirut and author of over ten books. His latest highly praised work, Yalo, was just published in English.

A Lebanese icon of international letters and activism, a novelist, playwright, and essayist, Khoury has experienced many of Beirut’s wartime milestones since the ’50s, and he joined the fighting in 1975. But soon after, realizing that Lebanon had so few written records that, in effect, the nation had erased its history, he looked beyond military resistance. He wanted to write, to materialize, as it were, a history. He took this further by separating literature and politics and conceiving of literature as a militant act. In 1993, he stated in the Beirut Review that “literature cannot be reduced to politics: I went through the war, and could not avoid writing about it. But literature is about rethinking everything, including politics; it is not mainly about politics.”

In reviewing the new novel, the article goes on to describe how the “intense interiority forces the reader to feel something beyond the story.” The LA Times has only fond words for his challenging style and adds:

“Yalo" 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.”