num_pages: 191
description: Beirut – where plastic surgery meets the emotional intensity of the legendary diva Umm Kulthum, and Lebanese foodies go on the rampage. Transit Beirut is an anthology of complex urban experience that brings together memoir, short stories, journalism, photography and animation. The view is wide: from fiction to documentary and everything in between. Beirut is undergoing an energetic process of rediscovery and reinvention by its own inhabitants, many of whom are only now returning to the city.With new and established Arab writers together for the first time, Transit Beirut oscillates between sarcastic humour and serious exploration of the tensions and conflicts in a society undergoing reconstruction. Things are never what they seem. In Transit Beirut, students express themselves in the language of military conquest and athletes train to ‘defeat’ cholesterol; T.E. Lawrence, Orientalism and a PLO grandmother’s revolutionary milk interlace, and a pine forest becomes a graveyard.Malu Halasa has been published by the Guardian, Financial Times and Times, in London. For four years, she was the features editor of Tank magazine. She is the managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library in the Netherlands.Roseanne Khalaf is an Assistant Professor of English and coordinator of Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut. Her publications include: Once Upon a Time in Lebanon, and Lebanon: Four Journeys to the Past. She was the co-editor of Themes, a twelfth-grade English Textbook for the National Centre for Educational Research and Development, in Beirut.
language: English
title: Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images
titlecomplete: Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images
genres: Lebanon
ratings_count: 10
publisher: Saqi Books