![]() ![]() Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. ![]() Like a true hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this centurya funny, captivating novel that enchants and dazzles from its very first lines: Listen. The Hakawati (storyteller in Arabic) is a novel written by Rabih Alameddine and published by Alfred A. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless warand of survival. Here are Abraham and Isaac Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes the ancient, fabled Fatima and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Osamas grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching storiesof his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibsterare interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his fathers deathbed. ![]()
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