A highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan’s work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time.

Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan’s presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems—an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives.

Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan’s poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from six volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body.
 

The concluding novel in a trilogy that has become a landmark of Palestinian fiction.

An Old Carriage with Curtains is the third and final book in a masterful trilogy of novels encompassing the history of the people of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya. The novels trace the wandering trajectories and inner lives of characters connected to this village across decades, as well as the vicissitudes of historical change and displacement in the land. Through the return of a middle-aged man to the site of an ancient monastery in the hills near Jericho that he once visited as a boy, the incredibly vivid and surprising stories of Hind, a stage actress and brilliant storyteller, the stories of tortuous routes of checkpoints and bureaucratic blockages, and decades of Occupation, Zaqtan creates a narrative of personal reckoning and reflection.

The vectors of memory and historical reflection interweave in this dreamlike narrative, which delivers a singularly powerful depiction of subjective and collective experience in the face of devastating and sweeping historical change.

A novel exploring the descent of superficially decent people into vindictive killers.
 
What could bring people to form a mob and attack others? What circumstances could provoke a thirst for blood at the market square? Who will gang up to batter their neighbor, improbably returned from deportation? How can a person be swept up among lynchers?

Pál Závada’s novel examines and analyses the anti-Semitic mass hysteria and political opportunism surrounding the pogroms in Hungary that followed World War II and the Holocaust. In May 1946, at the village market, Mária Csóka witnessed a group of women set upon and beat to death a Jewish egg seller. The wife of a schoolteacher accused of anti-Semitic incitement, and daughter of a respected shopkeeper, Mária fears for her husband’s life yet cannot ignore the victims. The murderous fury spreads through the neighborhood like wildfire, dragging out women, children, and the elderly alike. Mária’s notes from the bloody day at the village market and from the subsequent trial in Budapest testify to a state of human relations that is intimately complex and irreparably scarred.