
Is This How You Eat a Watermelon?
Zein El-Amine
(Author)Description
A dozen boarding school students find themselves stranded at the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. A young man, a young woman, and a mistreated monkey unite in a bid to survive. Even Israel's war on Lebanon cannot stop an old woman from getting her fix of nicotine. A young Lebanese student on a visit to Bahrain is wrongly implicated as a terrorist and placed in a prison with other political prisoners where light and hope is absconding. Fresh snow compels a sacrilegious undertaking from a father much to the shock of his children. Shared trauma takes the shape of spectral phantoms. And in the titular story, a hedonistic man eats himself to an early death with the desecration of the city of Beirut forming the backdrop.
Product Details
Publisher | Radix Media |
Publish Date | November 08, 2022 |
Pages | 200 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781737718420 |
Dimensions | 8.0 X 5.4 X 0.4 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland. His
poems have appeared in Wild River Review, Folio, Beltway
Quarterly, Foreign Policy In Focus, CityLit, Graylit, Split This
Rock, Penumbra, DC Poets Against The War: An Anthology,
Ghostfishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. His latest
poetry manuscript A Travel Guide for the Exiled was recently
shortlisted for the Bergman Prize, judged by Louise Glück. His
short stories have appeared in the Uno Mas, Jadaliyya, Middle
East Report, Wild River Review, About Place Journal, and in
Bound Off.
Reviews
--Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
"This may technically be a debut collection, but author Zein El-Amine has the sweet, gravelly voice of a veteran storyteller.
In each short story, we encounter ordinary people living under extraordinary circumstances: under aerial bombardment, in detention, in an abandoned school surrounded by militias. In each situation, El-Amine shows how a single object--a voluptuous snow woman, a slice of watermelon, a daisy, a pair of baby blue OP shorts, a pack of cigarettes--reveals everything about the fragility and beauty of everyday life."
Elliott Colla, Baghdad Central
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