ELIAS KHOURY (b. 1948) is a Lebanese novelist, playwright, critic, and prominent public intellectual who has been called "a writer of panoramic scope and ambition" and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world."

In 1967, as Lebanese intellectual life became increasingly polarised, Khoury visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan and enlisted in Fatah, the largest resistance organization in the PLO.  He left Jordan after thousands of Palestinians were killed or expelled in the wake of Black September, and became a researcher at the PLO research center in Beirut.  Between 1993 and 2009, he served as editor of the weekly cultural supplement of the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar.

Khoury's novels are notable for their complex approach to political themes and fundamental questions of human behaviour.  His narrative technique often involves an interior monologue, at times approaching a stream of consciousness.  In recent works he has tended to use a considerable element of colloquial Arabic, which adds to the credibility and immediacy of the narrative voice, and has become part of the narrative technique of his works.

THE LITTLE MOUNTAIN (1977) is set during the Lebanese civil war, a conflict Khoury initially thought would be a catalyst for progressive change.  THE JOURNEY OF LITTLE GANDHI (1989) is about a rural immigrant to Beirut who lives through the events of the civil war.  His most famous work, GATE OF THE SUN (2000), draws on the stories he gathered from refugee camps over the course of many years.  It is an epic re-telling of the life of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon since the 1948 exodus, and has been called the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga.  Khoury weaves together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, humanizing the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.

In YALO (2002), the protagonist is a soldier in Lebanon's civil war, before becoming a deserter and a thief, a nightwatchman in Paris, an arms smuggler, and then a rapist.  The novel is a modern Thousand and One Nights, a series of confessions extracted under torture, a recitation of all of his memories, all his sorrows, all his guilt — and of the other crimes his interrogators have him confess to.  MY NAME IS ADAM (2016), the first of three projected volumes collectively entitled "Children of the Ghetto", investigates what happened in 1948 in the Palestinian city of Lydda: the massacre, the forced march into the wilderness and the corralling of those citizens who did not flee into what the Israeli soldiers and their Palestinian captives came to refer to as the Ghetto.  Khoury listens to the way that Palestinians have lived with the history of catastrophe, not by creating alternative narratives, but by cultivating silence and secrecy, shoring up fragments against their ruin.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise indicated:

== NOVELS ==

* As Though She Were Sleeping (Archipelago, 2012). M. Booth, trans.
* Broken Mirrors (Archipelago, 2015).  H. Davies, trans.
* Gate of the Sun (Archipelago, 2006).  H. Davies, trans.
* Journey of Little Gandhi, The (Picador, 2011).  P. Haydar, trans.
* Kingdom of Strangers (Arkansas, 1996).  P. Haydar, trans. — PDF
* Little Mountain (Picador, 2007).  M. Tabet, trans.
* My Name Is Adam [Children of the Ghetto I] (Archipelago, 2019). H. Davies, trans.
* White Masks (Archipelago, 2010).  M. Tabet, trans.
* Yalo (Archipelago, 2008).  P. Theroux, trans.

== OTHER ==

* Art of Fiction no. 233, The (Paris Review, Spring 2017) — PDF (by pharmakate)

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