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PUB DATE: JANUARY 21, 2025 SEVEN STORIES PRESS sevenstories.com
SUMŪD: A NEW PALESTINIAN READER
SUMŪD: A NEW PALESTINIAN READER brings together some of the most eloquent Palestinian cultural and intellectual voices at a time when the future of Palestine hangs in the balance.
“Sumūd, the process of steadfastness, of survivance, is not just a project of survival, but also one of remembrance, record-keeping, and revitalization,” write Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably in the introduction to SUMŪD: A NEW PALESTINIAN READER (Seven Stories Press, October 22, 2024, paperback, includes 25 black and white illustrations by Palestinian artists). The world has now witnessed sumūd at its most tenacious, as the Palestinians hold on to life, dignity, and a centuries-old culture amid an onslaught that threatens their survival. The collected writings and art in SUMŪD: A NEW PALESTINIAN READER include some of the most incisive political commentary, moving poetry, and arresting art coming from Palestine. The intellectual and cultural richness that has been erased by decades of misrepresentation and silencing shines through on every page. The forty-six contributions include:
- Ahed Tamimi tells Dena Takruri about being radicalized as a child who witnessed the brutalities of occupation in “Childhood.”
- Ilan Pappé reviewing Imagining Palestine by Tahrir Hamdi, a book that reveals the power of Palestinian cultural resistance.
- Jordan Elgrably on the assassination of Palestinian writers in “They Kill Writers, Don’t They?”
- Lina Mounzer giving words to the horror of the latest attack on Gaza and the intent behind it in “Palestine and the Unspeakable.”
- Novelist Ahmed Masoud’s dystopian short story about two bored computer programmers who submit a bid to host the Olympics in a future Palestine as a prank and quickly find their joke turning to horror.
- Hossam Madhoun, co-founder of Gaza’s Theatre for Everybody, on surviving and creating in a war zone.
- Sara Roy and Ivar Ekeland on how Israel’s latest attack on Gaza has shattered the propaganda narratives long deployed to justify violence and occupation.
- Palestinian-American poet, Noor Hindi’s raw and darkly funny poem, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.”
ABOUT THE EDITORS
MALU HALASA, Literary Editor at The Markaz Review, is a Jordanian
Filipina American writer and editor. Her latest edited anthology is Woman
Life Freedom: Voices and Art From the Women’s Protests in Iran (Saqi Books, 2023) has been shortlisted for the 2024 Bread & Roses Prize for Radical Publishing.. Previous co-edited anthologies include: Syria Speaks:
Art and Culture from the Frontline (Saqi Books, 2014); The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design (Chronicle Books, 2008); Kaveh Golestan: Recording the Truth in Iran (Hatje Cantz, 2005); and the short series: Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images (Saqi Books, 2004), and Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, with Maziar
Bahari, (Garnet Press, 2008). She was managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library, in
Amsterdam; Editor at Large for Portal 9, in Beirut, and a founding editor of Tank Magazine, in London. She has written for The Guardian, Financial Times and Times Literary Supplement. Her debut novel, Mother of All Pigs (Unnamed Press, 2017), was described as: “a microcosmic portrait of … a patriarchal order in slow-motion decline” by the New York Times. Halasa has been writing about Palestine for the past thirty years.
JORDAN ELGRABLY is a Franco-American and Moroccan writer and translator, whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi, and the Paris Review. Editor-in-chief and founder of The Markaz Review, he is the cofounder and former director of the Levantine Cultural Center/The Markaz in Los Angeles (2001–2020), and producer of the stand-up comedy show “The Sultans of Satire” (2005–2017) and hundreds of other public programs. Most recently he is the editor of Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights 2024). He is based in Montpellier, France and California.
