Little Mountain

Literature & Fiction

Khoury, Elias

Contemporary

Collins, Harvill

I didn't fight, my dear man, for land or for history. I fought for the woman I loved. In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son, Dr. Khaleel - who has no real medical qualifications - nurses the older man, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. In an attempt to revive his patient, Khaleel, like a modern-day Sheherazade, begins telling Yunis the stories of their people's exile in Lebanon: their flight from Galilee in 1948; the violence of the 1950s; the massacre at the Shatila camp in 1982. He evokes deserted peasant villages, the suffering caused by the Lebanese civil war and the refugees' hopes to return home with a subtle mixture of anger and compassion. Khaleel also narrates Yunis' own extraordinary life: his childhood in Palestine and his commitment as a member of the fedayeen; perpetually on the run, fighting and hiding in caves. Interweaving many true-life tales collected throughout Lebanon and its refugee camps over the course of seven years, Elias Khoury has created a monumental and spellbinding saga, putting human faces to a political tragedy which remains at the forefront of the news even today.

Gate of the Sun: Bab El Chams

Literary

Archipelago

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
One of Kansas City Star's 100 Noteworthy Books of the Year
A Boldtype Notable Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
Drawing on the stories he gathered from refugee camps over the course of many years, Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the Sun has been called the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga.
Yunes, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. Keeping vigil at the old man's bedside is his spiritual son, Khalil, who nurses Yunes, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Khalil relates the story of Palestinian exile while also recalling Yunes's own extraordinary life and his love for his wife, whom he meets secretly over the years at Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun.

Gate of the Sun

Picador

City Gates was first published in Arabic in 1981, and in English in 1993. It is a further exploration of the themes of exile, dislocation, and identity. Elias Khoury's early works show him finding the distinctive voice that explodes in his epic Gate of the Sun.
A stranger arrives at the gates of a city from which everyone appears to have fled. The once besieged and now deserted city is Beirut. City Gates is a fable of displacement and a visionary tale about the consequences of civil war in the Middle East.

City Gates

Written in the opening phases of the Lebanese Civil War (1975--1990), Little Mountain is told from the perspectives of three characters: a Joint Forces fighter; a distressed civil servant; and an amorphous figure, part fighter, part intellectual. Elias Khoury's language is poetic and piercing as he tells the story of Beirut, civil war, and fractured identity.

"Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."--Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times 
From the author of Gate of the Sun and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab World" (The Washington Post Book World) comes the many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice. 
Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, Little Gandhi becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Once again, as John Leonard wrote in Harper's Magazine, Elias Khoury "fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."

The Journey of Little Gandhi: A Novel

Award-winning author Elias Khoury's latest novel is a searing look at truth and memory, love and trancendence, told through the contradictory confessions of a young Lebanese prisoner During the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, a young man is arrested and charged with rape. Repeatedly interrogated and tortured, Yalo is forced--like Scheherazade--to tell a different story each day to stay alive. As he battles to understand his past and the forces that have shaped him, he comes to discover his own voice and the true Yalo begins to emerge. This is a searing look at truth and memory, love and transcendence, from one of our most important Arab novelists.

Yalo: A Novel

Dramatizes modern life in Christian East Beirut

Little Mountain (Emergent Literature) (English and Arabic Edition)

Univ of Minnesota Pr

"He was born in Mashta Hasan, ran away from his father, who took him to his grandfather's cave, worked in the Miftah bakery in Tripoli, moved to Beirut where he worked in Abu Ayoun's restaurant, and then worked as a shoe shiner. He got married and had two children, Husn and Suad. Husn was a barber, and Suad was sick. He loved life and loved the flavor of it. Alice told him, and the Reverend Amin befriended him, and Davis turned him into a restaurant owner, and the dog died, and Gandhi grieved over the dog more than he grieved for his own father."Such was the journey of Abd al-Karim (Husn al-Ahmadi al-Mughayiri), nicknamed Little Gandhi. As told by Alice to the one who tells the story here, it is, however, not so simple. In the hands of Elias Khoury, the tale of this humble shoe shiner living and working in Beirut during the recent Lebanese war is also the story of a city, perhaps a world, coming apart at the seams.First published in Beirut, where it has gone through several printings, The Journey of Little Gandhi is representative of Khoury's distinctive style and narrative technique as well as his consistent exploration of Beirut as the locus of competing historical and political forces. As such, the book also reflects the author's significant, ongoing contribution to modern Arab literature.

The Journey of Little Gandhi (Emergent Literatures)

Elias Khoury is one of the most distinguished writers and intellectuals in the contemporary Arab world. His contributions to Arab culture are substantial and enormously diverse, including novels, literary criticism, and cultural critique. His distinction as a writer and critic in the Arab world, already recognized in France where many of his works have been published in French translation, is currently finding recognition in the United States as well. Gates of the City, Khoury's first novel, mixes the genres of the epic and the lyric to meditate on the pains and ravages of civil war. Khoury also provocatively draws on the traditions and themes of Arabic storytelling as articulated in A Thousand and One Nights. A man wanders the labyrinths of the city of Beirut (unidentified in the novel) out of the past and through the present into an uncertain future, a trajectory much like the city itself, the space of contested cultural claims as yet unresolved. The man must find his way through the city's passages, out of his own past, through the present, and into a still anticipated future.

Gates of the City (Emergent Literatures)

History & Criticism

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Books by Khoury, Elias

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

Little Mountain

Gate of the Sun: Bab El Chams

Gate of the Sun

City Gates

Little Mountain

The Journey of Little Gandhi: A Novel

Yalo: A Novel

Little Mountain (Emergent Literature) (English and Arabic Edition)

The Journey of Little Gandhi (Emergent Literatures)

Gates of the City (Emergent Literatures)