Death Is Hard Work

Available
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world
Product Details
Price
$18.00  $16.74
Publisher
St. Martins Press-3PL
Publish Date
Pages
192
Dimensions
5.3 X 8.2 X 0.6 inches | 0.4 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781250251077

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.

Become an affiliate
About the Author

Khaled Khalifa (1964-2023) was born near Aleppo, Syria, the fifth child of a family of thirteen siblings. He studied law at Aleppo University and actively participated in the foundation of Aleph magazine with a group of writers and poets. A few months later, the magazine was closed down by Syrian censorship. Active in the arts scene in Damascus where he lived, Khalifa was a writer of screenplays for television and cinema as well as novels that explore Syrian history. His 2019 novel Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Leri Price is the translator of Khaled Khalifa's In Praise of Hatred and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, as well as literature from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
Reviews

"[A] masterly new book . . . Novelists like Khalifa are so critical in these times. They give us a story, and stories are specific . . . With Death Is Hard Work, Khaled Khalifa has, intentionally or not, also laid claim to [Faulkner's mantle]." --Elliot Ackerman, The New York Times Book Review

"Searing . . . Khalifa is a soulful and perfectly unsentimental writer . . . Leri Price [. . .] is alive and faithful to the Syrian's unadorned and direct prose, sentences that often bring together the poetic and the horrific . . . Robust in its doubts, humane in its gaze, and gentle in its persistence." --Hisham Matar, The Guardian

"[A] brilliant, blackly absurdist road-trip novel, a restaging of As I Lay Dying in the thick of the world's most brutal civil war." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Astonishing . . . The journey recalls Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the long last ride of Addie Bundren; like Faulkner too, Khalifa employs a shifting array of voices and reflections, moving from perspective to perspective, present to past and back again. The effect is a persistent deepening, as stories are introduced and then revisited, details added through the play of memory . . . The power of the novel--of all Khalifa's novels--is that it unfolds within a human context, which pushes against and resists the prevailing social one." --David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Refusing to look away from its characters' challenges, the novel is clear-eyed in its presentation of living in a war zone. Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Syrian author Khalifa reaches readers with a style that is straightforward, true, and profound." --Emily Dziuban, Booklist (starred review)

"Khalifa's novel compellingly tackles the strain of responsibility felt by a man in war-torn Syria . . . serves as a reminder of the devastation of war and the power of integrity." --Publishers Weekly

"Insistent, memorable portrait of the small indignities and large horrors of the civil war in Syria . . . Suggestive at times of a modern Decameron and a skillfully constructed epic that packs a tremendous amount of hard-won knowledge into its pages." --Kirkus (starred review)

"Wryly compelling...Death Is Hard Work may be Khalifa's finest achievement yet, movingly conveying the fear, paranoia and hardships of life in an embattled police state." --The Financial Times

"If literature is a momentary stay against confusion, then Khalifa's novels are ardent stays against destruction and decay--and Death Is Hard Work continues this tradition." --Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

"Death is Hard Work moves in a way similar to the war it chronicles--mercilessly over the bones of its victims . . . The result is something at the intersection of Faulkner and Kafka, a modern-day As I Lay Dying passed through the lens of maddening bureaucracy, hypocrisy and slaughter." --Omar El Akkad, BookPage