“Khoury engages his own oeuvre in playful metafictional ways, along with real and invented scholarly texts, and larger Palestinian and Israeli literary histories to which this book is a timely and essential contribution. He rejects didacticism — “My story isn’t an attempt to prove something” — pirouetting between saying and unsaying, creating a mass of competing meanings from which Adam’s tormented psychology emerges. If Khoury makes any argument, however, it is that the expression of an “unadorned truth” is impossible, since all language is symbolic and metaphoric; words are weighed down by their histories… Khoury gives us a vivid glimpse of the unspeakable.” — New York Times Book Review
“Khoury insists that it is impossible to separate the stories of Palestinian and Jewish victimization, but his efforts to accompany the silence of the victims with their stories provide a generous and expansive terrain to think of histories of violence, of their remnants in the present, and of the complexities of survival.” — World Literature Today
“For Khoury, who was born in 1948 and whose life has been marked by almost continuous war, My Name is Adam marks the achievement of a long-held wish, dating back to his work as a member of Fatah in the late sixties and early seventies, to write a great epic about the Nakba … (Khoury) listen(s) 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.” — Asymptote
“My Name is Adam is an imaginative, prescient novel that lives within the literary, artistic and historical threads of Palestinian history.” —Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts
“My Name is Adam is framed as the notebooks of Palestinian writer Adam Dannoun . . . Each of the chapters from the unfinished novel are subtitled ‘Point of Entry,’ an echo of the process of writing a novel, or of creating an identity, or of navigating the many checkpoints in a segregated and securitized Palestine . . . The other notebooks are Adam’s personal account . . . Adam gathers stories from the community, peeling back layers of stifled memory. These sections feel more urgent and self-assured . . . narratively messier, darker, and more ambiguous.” — James Folta, “A Small Press Book We Love,” Literary Hub
Praise for Elias Khoury:
“There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion. In Humphrey Davies’ sparely poetic translation, Gate of the Sun is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork.” — New York Times Book Review
“Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world.” –– Washington Post Book World
“Elias Khoury is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages.” — Edward W. Said
“We need the voice of Elias Khoury–detailed, exquisite, humane–more than ever. Read him.” — Naomi Shihab Nye
“A writer of panoramic scope and ambition.” — Azadeh Moaveni, Financial Times
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