City Gates - by Elias Khoury (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

City Gates was first published in Arabic in 1981, and in English in 1993. It is a further exploration of the themes of exile, dislocation, and identity. Elias Khoury's early works show him finding the distinctive voice that explodes in his epic Gate of the Sun.

A stranger arrives at the gates of a city from which everyone appears to have fled. The once besieged and now deserted city is Beirut. City Gates is a fable of displacement and a visionary tale about the consequences of civil war in the Middle East.

From the Back Cover

Praise for author Elias Khoury

"Elias Khoury is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages."--Edward W. Said, author of Orientalism

"Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world."--The Washington Post Book World

"Khoury is, before everything else, a writer of stories. He loves them because there's no end to them. And because their meanings, very much like the reasons they're worth telling, get richer and more contradictory."--London Review of Books

"Because the world is the way it is, because whole groups of people can be maligned, neglected, ignored for too many years, we need the voice of Elias Khoury--detailed, exquisite, humane--more than ever. Read him. Without fail, read him."--Naomi Shihab Nye

Review Quotes

About the Author

Elias Khoury is the author of eleven novels including The Journey of Little Gandhi, The Kingdom of Strangers, and Yalo. He is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of Beirut's daily newspaper, An-Nahar.