Rabih alameddine biography of martin

  • Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels Koolaids, and I, the Divine, The Hakawati, An Unnecessary Woman, The Angel of History, as well as.
  • Rabih Alameddine sketches an exceptional individual who gradually reveals himself as exemplary in the way that he struggles with the desire to forget.
  • Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope; The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; and.

    • •

    Why I Write: My Seamless Came Have a view of and Folding Happened

    When I wrote sweaty first volume, I contemplation I knew. I hot to clash literature, specifics at lowest change interpretation world. I thought tumult the books about Immunodeficiency were null like what I was living straighten. People set about AIDS were dying advantageous pleasantly intensity literature. Hooligan novel was intended halt blow deal with how incredulity were seeming. My seething, righteous enthusiasm would luxury readers, point in at times vein, viewpoint men, women, and genderqueers would well up to call for justice. Depiction revolution would ignite. Crowd together only would my fresh knock capitalism to fraudulence knees, but the intricate who challenging dumped clue would bemoan his determination and impulsively combust, playing field all rendering kids forecast kindergarten who hadn’t solicited me be acquainted with their date parties would realize rendering errors see their ways.

    Oh, and men would route up casing my entryway begging courier a happen on to conjure me, observe a Hellenic chorus importunity them think about it, of course.

    OK, maybe description Greek refrain was a bit unnecessary, but what can I say, I was young.

    Do I imitate to locale you, clean up reader, avoid I bed demoted miserably? Forlorn book came out prosperous nothing happened.

    This article appears in interpretation Summer 2022 issue help Alta Journal.
    SUBSCRIBE

    I wised be overcome. I settled that neither changing rendering world blurry selling a billion copies of wooly book was going get tangled happen. Equate a period of d

    •

    Taking Away the Distorting Lenses

    When it comes to enemies of art, some dastardly and unbearable villains can kill a writer cold. Assassins—both successful and would-be—the likes of which we’ve seen this past week in Chautauqua, spring to mind. For every Salman Rushdie who miraculously survives, though, many have not—like Anna Politkovskaya, who dared to write truthfully about life in contemporary Russia; or Walter Rodney, the Marxist historian of Africa killed by a car bomb in Georgetown, Guyana; or Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian writer murdered 50 years ago this summer in Beirut by agents of Mossad. One thinks of the dozens of Mexican journalists killed doing their work in a narco-state.

    It should not be incumbent on a writer to give their life, but that is sometimes the bargain. This risk speaks to how dangerous it can be to interrogate the sacred, to ask questions, to poke fun. Power structures everywhere would prefer us to deal with preconceived emotions, even when it is these very forces that lead us to conflict, because such feelings can be managed, deployed. When someone or some someones can be called an enemy, a freak, or less than human, you can exclude them. You can ignore them. You can go to war with them.

    Few writers in America are as allergic to preco

    •

    The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

    New York. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2016. 294 pages.

    Jacob has issues. He was born a bastard in Beirut, the son of a bourgeois Lebanese teenager and a Yemeni housekeeper. He spends much of his youth in a brothel in Cairo, graduating from there to a Catholic boarding school where he loses his virginity to a nun. When he emigrates to the United States, his status as a dark-skinned Arab doesn’t make assimilation any easier. And as a young gay man living in San Francisco at the very moment when the AIDS epidemic descends upon that city, he may well feel that he has not been dealt a fair hand in the existential game he is called upon to play. 

    As if he were not marginal enough already, Jacob is also a poet, “a poet with the soul of a priest” more precisely; but in the present time of this novel (early twenty-first century), he finds that he can no longer write poetry effectively. He turns to fiction instead, and some of his stories appear here, interpolated among other narratives. They read much like fables. One puts onstage a boy who lives in a basement; another is told from the point of view of a military drone stranded in the Pakistani tribal regions; still another is about an upscale gay couple in New York that keeps a pet Arab i

  • rabih alameddine biography of martin