A Curious Land: Stories from Home (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.97 (807 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1625341873 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-03-24 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A Curious Land gives voice to the experiences of Palestinians in the last century. In the past few months, her mother had sold all her gold, except for her bracelet made of liras. That was all.They'd arrived here only last night, stopping as soon as Awwad and the men were sure the army had moved south. The morning sun glazed everything around herthe cement homes, the iron rails along one wall, the bars on the windows, the stones around the welland made her squint her itchy eyes.She was hungry. She hoped this war would end soon, and she didn't really care who won, as long as it ended because they hadn't eaten well in two years. An excerpt from A Curious Land:When Rabab lowered the magad and clapped-clapped to the well in her mother's too-big slippers, the stone jar digging into her shoulder, she didn't, at first, see the body. Susan Muaddi Darraj's short story collection about the inhabitants of a Palestinian West Bank village, Tel al-Hilou, spans generations and continents to explore ideas of memory, belonging, connection, and, ultimately, the deepest and richest meaning of home. It must have been the third time in just a few weekscollapse the tents, load the mules, disappear in
Susan Muaddi Darraj's well-crafted characters and her brilliant attention to the details of their individual and collective experiences of love, occupation, immigration, and loss over the span of several decades creates an immensely powerful, intimate, and complex portrait of Palestinian lives, both at home and in the diaspora."Carol Fadda-Conrey, Associate Professor of English, Syracuse University . The author's empathy for the large cast of embattled characters is miraculous. The stories in A Curious Land do that, but they take the experience furtherwhile still intimate, their breadth and vision is epic. In particular, we get to know the quietly heroic Palestinian women in these stories as intimately as we know the people closest to us. "Praise for The Inheritance of Exile: Susan Muaddi Darraj writes with care and intelligence, and her compassion for her flawed and complex character
Loved this book. Jennifer Zeynab Maccani I loved A CURIOUS LAND. The stories are masterfully linked by their characters, members of a single village whose tales intertwine and overlap in epic, unexpected ways over the course of several generations, creating a rich, multi-faceted portrait of a Palestinian family. A collec. Great collection of stories I was commissioned to write this review by Necessary Fiction, a lit mag. Here is a portion of that review:A Curious Land: Stories from Home is a collection of interconnected short stories, set primarily in Tel al-Hilou, a village in the West Bank in Palestine, spanning almost a ce. "these stories offer (especially to someone like me, who knows very little about this part" according to Brad Windhauser. An engaging set of (somewhat-loosely) interlocking narratives. These stories follow interesting people who find themselves in situations that feel so true to character and unfold so effortlessly they almost don't feel shaped at all (this is a compliment). Given that they are mostl
Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was honored by the U.S. State Department's Arabic Book Program. . Susan Muaddi Darraj's stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in New York Stories, Orchid Literary Review, Banipal, Mizna, al-Jadid, and several anthologies. A