The Arsonists' City is Hala Alyan's second novel, published by HarperCollins in 2020. The book structure follows the Nasr family into the past and the present repeatedly to unfold the intergenerational trauma caused by war and secrets passed down from parents to children. [1]
Idris Nasr, the new patriarch of the Nasr family after his father’s death, decides to sell his childhood home in Beirut, Lebanon. The matriarch of the family, Mazna Nasr dislikes the home in Beirut due to all the memories she had from her adolescence with Zakaria- Idris’ childhood friend- but despite this she asks for her children’s help to prevent Idris from selling the home.
In the present time, we follow the children of Mazna and Idris, who struggle deeply to assimilate to American culture as many children of migrants do. So much so that it was a factor as to why Naj decided to move back to Beirut, despite having to stay closeted.
The family decides to go back to Idris' home in Beirut to hold a service for his father, in which during that time the book flips to the past, giving us a glimpse of the type of relationship Mazna, Zakaria, and Idris had during the civil war.
Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was a prominent Palestinian author and politician, considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading Palestinian writers. Kanafani's works have been translated into more than 17 languages.
The persecution of Jews has been a major event in Jewish history, prompting shifting waves of refugees and the formation of diaspora communities. As early as 605 BCE, Jews who lived in the Neo-Babylonian Empire were persecuted and deported. Antisemitism was also practiced by the governments of many different empires and the adherents of many different religions (Christianity), and it was also widespread in many different regions of the world.
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Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist and public intellectual. His novels and literary criticism have been translated into several languages. In 2000, he won the Prize of Palestine for his book Gate of the Sun, and he won the Al Owais Award for fiction writing in 2007. Khoury has also written three plays and two screenplays.
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Jennifer Fox is an American film producer, director, cinematographer, and writer as well as president of A Luminous Mind Film Productions. She won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for her first feature documentary, Beirut: The Last Home Movie. Her 2010 documentary My Reincarnation had its premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2010, where it won a Top 20 Audience Award.
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Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, addiction, and cross-cultural behavior. Her writing covers aspects of identity and the effects of displacement, particularly within the Palestinian diaspora. She is also known for acting in the short films I Say Dust and Tallahassee.
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Events in the year 2022 in Lebanon.