Acclaimed novelist Sayed Kashua, the creator of the groundbreaking Israeli sitcom, Arab Labor,” has been widely praised for his literary eye and deadpan wit. His new novel is considered internationally to be his most accomplished and entertaining work yet. Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Award, Second Person Singular centers on an ambitious lawyer who is considered one of the best Arab criminal attorneys in Jerusalem. He has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of town, a large house, speaks perfect Hebrew, and is in love with his wife and two young children. One day at a used bookstore, he picks up a copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, and inside finds a love letter, in Arabic, in his wife’s handwriting. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer hunts for the book’s previous ownera man named Yonatanpulling at the strings that hold all their lives together. With enormous emotional power, and a keen sense of the absurd, Kashua spins a tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, and questions whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves. Second Person Singular is a deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.

Second Person Singular

Literature & Fiction

Kashua, Sayed

Literary

GROVE PRESS

"Part comedy of manners, part psychological mystery . . . Issues of nationalism, religion, and passing collide with quickly changing social and sexual mores." —Boston Globe From one of the most important contemporary voices to emerge from the Middle East comes a gripping tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, which asks whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves, to shed our old skin and start anew. Second Person Singular follows two men, a successful Arab criminal attorney and a social worker-turned-artist, whose lives intersect under the most curious of circumstances. The lawyer has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of Jerusalem, a large house, a Mercedes, speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, and is in love with his wife and two young children. In an effort to uphold his image as a sophisticated Israeli Arab, he often makes weekly visits to a local bookstore to pick up popular novels. On one fateful evening, he decides to buy a used copy of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, a book his wife once recommended. To his surprise, inside he finds a small white note, a love letter, in Arabic, in her handwriting. I waited for you, but you didn't come. I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow? Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer slips into a blind rage over the presumed betrayal. He first considers murder, revenge, then divorce, but when the initial sting of humiliation and hurt dissipates, he decides to hunt for the book's previous owner—a man named Yonatan, a man who is not easy to track down, whose identity is more complex than imagined, and whose life is more closely aligned with his own than expected. In the process of dredging up old ghosts and secrets, the lawyer tears the string that holds all of their lives together. A Palestinian who writes in Hebrew, Sayed Kashua defies classification and breaks through cultural barriers. He communicates, with enormous emotional power and a keen sense of the absurd, the particular alienation and the psychic costs of people struggling to straddle two worlds. Second Person Singular is a deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.

Sayed Kashua has been praised by the New York Times as a master of subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society.” An Arab-Israeli who lived in Jerusalem for most of his life, Kashua started writing with the hope of creating one story that both Palestinians and Israelis could relate to, rather than two that cannot coexist together. He devoted his novels and his satirical weekly column published in Haaretz to telling the Palestinian story and exploring the contradictions of modern Israel, while also capturing the nuances of everyday family life in all its tenderness and chaos. With an intimate tone fueled by deep-seated apprehension and razor-sharp ironic wit, Kashua has been documenting his own life as well as that of society at large: he writes about his children’s upbringing and encounters with racism, about fatherhood and married life, the Jewish-Arab conflict, his professional ambitions, travels around the world as an author, andmore than anythinghis love of books and literature. He brings forth a series of brilliant, caustic, wry, and fearless reflections on social and cultural dynamics as experienced by someone who straddles two societies. Written between 2006 and 2014, Native reads like an unrestrained, profoundly thoughtful personal journal.

Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life

Essays & Correspondence

Sayed Kashua has been praised by the New York Times as "a master of subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society." An Israeli-Palestinian who lived in Jerusalem for most of his life, Kashua started writing in Hebrew with the hope of creating one story that both Palestinians and Israelis could relate to, rather than two that cannot coexist. He devoted his novels and his satirical weekly column published in Haaretz to exploring the contradictions of modern Israel while also capturing the nuances of family life in all its tenderness and chaos. Over the last decade, Kashua's humorous essays have been among the most widely read columns in Israel. He writes about fatherhood and marriage, the Jewish-Arab conflict, encounters with prejudice, his professional ambitions, and his love of literature. With an intimate tone fueled by deep-seated apprehension and a razor-sharp ironic wit, he has documented his own life as well as that of society at large—from instructing his daughter on when it's appropriate to speak Arabic (everywhere, anytime, except at the entrance to a mall) to navigating security at Ben Gurion airport (in a Citroen that he'd bought especially for checkpoints: "God in heaven, who ever saw an Arab driving a Citroen?") to opening a Facebook account during the Arab Spring (so that he wouldn't miss the next revolution). From these events of his everyday life, Kashua brings forth a series of brilliant, caustic, wry, and fearless reflections on social and cultural dynamics as experienced by someone who straddles two societies. Amusing and sincere, Native—a selection of his popular columns—is comprised of unrestrained, profoundly thoughtful personal dispatches.

Hailed as “an unusually gifted storyteller with exceptional insight” (Jewish Tribune), Bernstein award-winning writer Sayed Kashua presents his masterful fourth novel Track Changes which follows an Arab-Israeli man as he reckons with the weight of his past, his memories, and his cultural identity.
 Having emigrated to America years before, a nameless memoirist now residing in Illinois receives word that his estranged father, whom he has not spoken to in fourteen years, is dying. Leaving his wife and their three children, he returns to Jerusalem and to his hometown of Tira in Palestine to be by his family’s side. But few are happy to see him back and, geographically and emotionally displaced, he feels more alienated from his life than ever. 
 Sitting by his father’s hospital bed, the memoirist begins to remember long-buried traumas, the root causes of his fallout with his family, the catalyst for his marriage and its recent dissolution, and his strained relationships with his children—all of which is strangely linked to a short story he published years ago about a young girl named Palestine. As he plunges deeper into his memory and recounts the history of his land and his love, the lines between truth and lies, fact and fiction become increasingly blurred.
 Track Changes is a stunningly original, poignant, and captivating exploration of alienation, love, country, and memory by one of the most important writers at work today.

Track Changes

United States

Hailed as "an unusually gifted storyteller with exceptional insight" (Jewish Tribune), Bernstein award-winning writer Sayed Kashua presents his masterful fourth novelTrack Changes which follows an Arab-Israeli man as he reckons with the weight of his past, his memories, and his cultural identity. Having emigrated to America years before, a nameless memoirist now residing in Illinois receives word that his estranged father, whom he has not spoken to in fourteen years, is dying. Leaving his wife and their three children, he returns to Jerusalem and to his hometown of Tira in Palestine to be by his family's side.&nbsp; But few are happy to see him back and, geographically and emotionally displaced, he feels more alienated from his life than ever.&nbsp; Sitting by his father's hospital bed, the memoirist begins to remember long-buried traumas, the root causes of his fallout with his family, the catalyst for his marriage and its recent dissolution, and his strained relationships with his children--all of which is strangely linked to a short story he published years ago about a young girl named Palestine. As he plunges deeper into his memory and recounts the history of his land and his love, the lines between truth and lies,fact and fiction become increasingly blurred. Track Changesis a stunningly original, poignant, and captivating exploration of alienation, love, country, and memory by one of the most important writers at work today.

In his debut, Dancing Arabs, Sayed Kashua established himself as one of the most daring voices of the Middle East. In his searing new novel, a young Arab journalist returns to his hometown — an Arab village within Israel — where his already vexed sense of belonging is forced to crisis when the village becomes a pawn in the never-ending power struggle that is the Middle East. Hoping to reclaim the simplicity of life among kin, the prodigal son returns home to find that nothing is as he remembers: everything is smaller, the people are petty and provincial. But when Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, the village devolves into a Darwinian jungle, where paranoia quickly takes hold and threatens the community's fragile equilibrium. With the enduring moral and literary power of Camus and Orwell, Let It Be Morning offers an intimate, eye-opening portrait of the conflicted allegiances of the Israeli Arabs, proving once again that Sayed Kashua is a fearless, prophetic observer of a political and human quagmire that offers no easy answers.

Let It Be Morning

Contemporary

Grove Press/ Black Cat

Sayed Kashua has been lauded by the New York Times as 'a master of subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society.' A Palestinian-Israeli who lived in Jerusalem for most of his life, Kashua started writing with the hope of creating one story that both sides could relate to. He devoted his novels and his satirical column in Haaretz to exploring the contradictions of modern Israel while also capturing the nuances of everyday family life in all its tenderness and chaos. Over the last decade, his humorous essays have been among the most widely read in Israel. He writes about fatherhood and marriage, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and encounters with prejudice, as well as his love of literature. With an intimate tone fueled by deep-seated apprehension and razor-sharp wit, he has documented his own life as well as that of society at large from instructing his daughter on when it s appropriate to speak Arabic (everywhere, anytime, except at the entrance to a mall) to opening a Facebook account during the Arab Spring (so that he wouldn t miss the next revolution). From the events of his everyday life, Kashua brings forth a series of brilliant, caustic, wry, and fearless reflections on social and cultural dynamics as experienced by someone who straddles two societies. Amusing and sincere, Native a selection of his popular columns is comprised of unrestrained, profoundly thoughtful personal dispatches.

Native: Dispatches from a Palestinian-Israeli Life 2016

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Saqi Books

Hailed as "an unusually gifted storyteller with exceptional insight" (Jewish Tribune), Bernstein award-winning writer Sayed Kashua presents his masterful fourth novel Track Changes, which follows an Arab-Israeli man as he reckons with the weight of his past, his memories, and his cultural identity.

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Let it be Morning: A Novel

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Books by Kashua, Sayed

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kashua, Sayed. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Second Person Singular

Second Person Singular

Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life

Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life

Track Changes

Track Changes

Let It Be Morning

Native: Dispatches from a Palestinian-Israeli Life 2016

Track Changes

Let it be Morning: A Novel