CANCELLED: April’s meeting of The Reading Palestine series is cancelled due to a family emergency. :(

We will postpone our discussion of Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani until sometime in June.

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Note: in discussion we will focus mainly on the novella contained in the collection, Returning to Haifa.

About the book:

"Politics and the novel," Ghassan Kanafani once said, "are an indivisible case." Fadl al-Naqib reflected that Kanafani "wrote the Palestinian story, then he was written by it." His narratives offer entry into the Palestinian experience of the conflict that has anguished the people of the Middle East for more than a century.

In Palestine's Children, each story involves a child—a child who is victimized by political events and circumstances, but who nevertheless participates in the struggle toward a better future. As in Kanafani's other fiction, these stories explore the need to recover the past—the lost homeland—by action. At the same time, written by a major talent, they have a universal appeal.

This edition includes the translators' contextual introduction and a short biography of the author.

Born in Acre (northern Palestine) in 1936, Ghassan Kanafani was a prominent spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and founding editor of its weekly magazine Al-Hadaf. His novels and short stories have been published in sixteen languages. He was killed in Beirut in 1972 in the explosion of his booby-trapped car.