Death Is Hard Work
Description
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war
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About the Author
Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He has written numerous screenplays and is the author of several novels, including In Praise of Hatred, which was short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013. He lives in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing Syrian civil war.
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] 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 . . . 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
