Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan (Editor)

Overview

“Haunting” stories about crimes that are “often submerged in the greater tragedy of a beautiful city constantly torn within and without by violence” (Publishers Weekly).
 
Beirut is a city both urban and rural, a city of violence and forgiveness, memory and forgetfulness, war and peace. This short story collection, rich with moody suspense, brings this Middle Eastern city and its troubled history to vivid life—revealing the vast maze of the city that can’t be found in tourist brochures or hazy, nostalgic depictions of Beirut.
 
Featuring brand-new stories by Rawi Hage, Mohamad Abi Samra, Leila Eid, Hala Kawtharani, Marie Tawk, Bana Baydoun, Hyam Yared, Najwa Barakat, Alawiyeh Sobh, Mazen Zahreddine, Abbas Beydoun, Bachir Hilal, Zena El Khalil, Mazen Maarouf, and Tarek Abi Samra.
 
“The Lebanese authors featured in the collection draw from a much broader palette of Beirut life, and, true to the genre, they tap into their city’s dark past and uncertain present. Some stories are absurd and humorous, but almost all are haunted in some way by a nagging memory, a war, a death.” —The National

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617753596
Publisher:	Akashic Books
Publication date:	03/01/2019
Series:	Akashic Noir Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	258
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer, creative writing teacher, translator, editor/publisher, and journalist. Her novels B as in Beirut, Wild Mulberries, Other Lives, and The Weight of Paradise, all written in Arabic, have been translated and published internationally. She is the cofounder of the Lebanese chapter of PEN, and splits her time between Beirut and Paris. She is the editor of Beirut Noir.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Violence of Loneliness, Violence of Mayhem

Beirut is a city of contradiction and paradox. It is an urban and rural city, one of violence and forgiveness, memory and forgetfulness. Beirut is a city of war and peace. This story collection is a part of a vibrant, living recovery of Beirut. Beirut Noir recovers the city once again through writing, through the literary visions of its authors.

Assembling this collection was an ambitious experiment for me; editing it was fascinating and full of challenges. It is by no means easy to bring together a book of fifteen short stories by writers with such different perspectives on Beirut. Fourteen Lebanese writers, and one Palestinian writer born and raised in Beirut, contributed to the book you are holding today. Taken together, their stories reflect the city's underworld and seedy realities. Each story is only one tiny piece of a larger mosaic; they all coalesce here to offer us a more complete picture of the city.

There are so many clichés we must confront when examining Beirut. It is difficult to write about it without describing it as a city that never sleeps, as the center of life, and also as a city that is the companion of death. These two descriptions are inextricably linked, though they may seem contradictory. Those of us who live here and know the city well recognize these powerful characterizations that we hold in our collective imagination. Elsewhere, I once described Beirut as "the city that dances on its wounds."

We know that Lebanon is a country with a long and rich history of diverse cultures and religious traditions, as well as a wealth of languages. Every school in Lebanon teaches three languages — Arabic, English, and French; I kept this trilingual background in mind when choosing the stories for this collection. Michelle Hartman, who has previously translated two of my novels, meticulously translated these stories from both Arabic and French into English; there are also three stories originally written in English.

From within this collection of stories, a general attitude toward Beirut emerges: the city is viewed from a position of critique, doubt, disappointment, and despair. The stories reveal a vast maze of a city that can't be found in tourist brochures or nostalgic depictions that are completely out of touch with reality. Perhaps this goes without saying in a collection of stories titled Beirut Noir. But the "noir" label here should be viewed from multiple angles, as it takes on many different forms in the stories. No doubt this is because it overlaps with the distinct moments that Beirut has lived through.

All of the stories are somehow framed by the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from approximately 1974 until 1990. The war here serves as a boundary between the memories of the authors and the memories of their characters. Indeed, whether the stories include time frames during, before, or after the war, all of them invoke this period somehow — even if only to recall other times of which nothing remains.

Some of the stories explore the memory of people wounded by Beirut during the war, who have not yet healed. These works include Mohamad Abi Samra's "Without a Trace," Leila Eid's "Beirut Apples," Marie Tawk's "Sails on the Sidewalk," Abbas Beydoun's "The Death of Adil Uliyyan," Bachir Hilal's "Rupture," and Hala Kawtharani's "The Thread of Life." Other stories are told by new and fresh voices born amidst the violence of this war. These brim with playfulness within their dark visions, such as Hyam Yared's "Eternity and the Hourglass," Najwa Barakat's "Under the Tree of Melancholy," and "Dirty Teeth" by a young author writing under the name of The Amazin' Sardine. Some suggest the complexities of class issues in a society marked by sectarianism, like Tarek Abi Samra's "The Bastard" or Mazen Maarouf's "The Boxes."

While the tales might be playful, the characters' lives can be unstable, and they often have no confidence whatsoever in the future. Despite this, we laugh darkly while reading Bana Beydoun's "Pizza Delivery" — its melancholia takes us right to the limit of what we can find humorous. This is also true of Rawi Hage's "Bird Nation," as well as the stories by Hyam Yared and Bachir Hilal. Beirut is like that. So much gloom and wasted lives; we weep even as we laugh. In Beirut, chaos is a way of life.

This is not all there is to Beirut though. The city is still crowded and on the move; indeed, it can be boisterous at night. But these crowds and mayhem are not the same as those during the day. Beirut nights are different. It's as if in the absence of day, the city is freed from its severity. Nighttime somehow softens its harshness and anxiety; the city can be seen in its lights reflecting off the sea, its expansive sweep under the nearby mountains, and its truly beautiful vistas. The contributions from Bana Beydoun and Mazen Zahreddine offer portraits of the city at night, through the lives of young people born after the war. This is a Beirut where the violence of loneliness and the violence of mayhem come together.

Chaos reigns here — it is the source not only of violence but also the diversity and dynamism of every aspect of the city. Most stories in the collection confirm this — but especially those by Rawi Hage, Zena el Khalil, and Alawiya Sobh.

And yet time is precious in Beirut. Hyam Yared's story, centered around an hourglass, is a reflection of the fear people have of time flowing through our fingers and being lost, just as Lebanese people lost fifteen years of their lives during the civil war.

Through the eyes of the dead child who is the eponymous narrator of el Khalil's "Maya Rose," we see a panoramic scene of Beirut's coastline from above the Corniche by the lighthouse and beyond. This story, like the entirety of Beirut Noir, allows us to glimpse beautiful things in Beirut, even as it wakes and sleeps in violence and disorder.

Beirut lives through time, always oscillating between war and peace; these moments make Beirut Noir's scenery as naked as the edge of a knife.

Iman Humaydan Beirut, Lebanon September 2015

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Beirut Noir"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Akashic Books.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: When Time Does Not Exist

“The Bastard” by Tarek Abi Samra (Chiyah)

“Maya Rose” by Zena el Khalil (Ain el Mreisseh)

“Pizza Delivery” by Bana Beydoun (Manara)

“Under the Tree of Melancholy” by Najwa Barakat (Gemmayzeh)

“Eternity and the Hourglass” by Hyam Yared (Trabaud Street)

Part II: Panorama of the Soul

“Beirut Apples” by Leila Eid (Bourj Hammoud)

“Bird Nation” by Rawi Hage (Corniche/Ashrafieh)

“Dirty Teeth” by The Amazin’ Sardine (Monot Street)

“The Boxes” by Mazen Maarouf (Caracas)

“Rupture” by Bachir Hilal (Tallet al-Khayyat)

Part III: Waiting for Yesterday

“The Thread of Life” by Hala Kawtharani (Bliss Street)

“Without a Trace” by Mohamad Abi Samra (Raouché)

“The Death of Adil Uliyyan” by Abbas Beydoun (Ras Beirut)

“Scent of a Woman, Scent of a City” by Alawiya Sobh (Khandaq al-Ghamiq)

“Sails on the Sidewalk” by Marie Tawk (Sin el Fil)

Editorial Reviews

10/12/2015
Humaydan writes in her introduction to this haunting anthology that “all of the stories are somehow framed by the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from approximately 1974 until 1990.” The war’s pervasive dislocations and disruptions have a wide range of voices. In Leila Eid’s “Beirut Apples,” the narrator notes, “There was no need to count the years here... our lives were made of gunfire, random bullets shot by depraved snipers.” In Hala Kawtharani’s “The Thread of Life,” a doctor is inured to the horrific injuries he treats, until he becomes obsessed with a woman in a coma. The narrator of Zena el Khalil’s “Maya Rose” is a stillborn baby, whose soul rises above the battle-scarred land below. The crimes in this Akashic noir volume are often submerged in the greater tragedy of a beautiful city constantly torn within and without by violence. Three of the 15 selections were originally written in English. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"The fifteen new stories of Beirut Noir were assembled by Lebanese novelist Iman Humaydan and deftly translated by Michelle Hartman. They were written in all of Lebanon's three main languages—Arabic, English, and French—and they approach the noir genre in markedly different ways. But they are united by loss: their characters have been left behind after so many countrymen have fled for the Lebanese countryside, Canada, the Gulf, the United States, South America, and Europe.
"

Qantara

"No book could possibly describe the different faces of 21st century Beirut better than Beirut Noir. This anthology of short stories by Lebanese writers living in different neighborhoods of Beirut covers the spectrum of the city’s paradoxical moods and colors—urban, rural, glorious, broken, traditional and liberal Beirut. Edited by Iman Humaydan Younes and including stories by Rawi Hage, Muhammad Abi Samra, Leila Eid and others, Beirut Noir forsakes nostalgia and exposes the city with crude honesty. This book will not sugar coat Beirut, but will show you the city in all its vulnerability and let you fall in love with it as it truly is."

The Culture Trip

"The ArabLit count in 2014, which attempted to be global, was 7/40, or 17% by female authors. All of this excludes anthologies, which are more likely to be egalitarian. For instance, the excellent 2015 Beirut Noir anthology, ed. Iman Humaydan, featured more than half women’s work."

Your Middle East

"The stories’ individual approaches to noir are as diverse as the Beirut landscape, its residents and exiles."

Middle East Monitor

"The Lebanese authors featured in the collection draw from a much broader palette of Beirut life, and, true to the genre, they tap into their city’s dark past and uncertain present. Some stories are absurd and humorous, but almost all are haunted in some way by a nagging memory, a war, a death."

The National

"The ArabLit count in 2014, which attempted to be global, was 7/40, or 17% by female authors. All of this excludes anthologies, which are more likely to be egalitarian. For instance, the excellent 2015 Beirut Noir anthology, ed. Iman Humaydan, featured more than half women's work."
—Your Middle East

"No book could possibly describe the different faces of 21st century Beirut better than Beirut Noir. This anthology of short stories by Lebanese writers living in different neighborhoods of Beirut covers the spectrum of the city's paradoxical moods and colors—urban, rural, glorious, broken, traditional and liberal Beirut. Edited by Iman Humaydan Younes and including stories by Rawi Hage, Muhammad Abi Samra, Leila Eid and others, Beirut Noir forsakes nostalgia and exposes the city with crude honesty. This book will not sugar coat Beirut, but will show you the city in all its vulnerability and let you fall in love with it as it truly is."
—The Culture Trip

"The fifteen new stories of Beirut Noir were assembled by Lebanese novelist Iman Humaydan and deftly translated by Michelle Hartman. They were written in all of Lebanon's three main languages—Arabic, English, and French—and they approach the noir genre in markedly different ways. But they are united by loss: their characters have been left behind after so many countrymen have fled for the Lebanese countryside, Canada, the Gulf, the United States, South America, and Europe."
—Qantara

From the Publisher