TAGS: Literature, Fiction, Classics, Short Stories, Essays, Literary Criticism, Palestine, Israel, Nakba, Arabic Literature, Palestinian Literature

* Ghassan Kanafani [Palestine] - Collected Fiction and Essays (5 books)

GHASSAN KANAFANI (Arabic: غسان فايز كنفاني‎; 1936 – 1972) was a prominent Palestinian author and political activist, considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's most important Palestinian writers.  Translated into more than 17 languages, 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.

Born in Acre, Mandatory Palestine, Kanafani's family were forced out of their hometown during the 1948 Palestine war.  They settled in Damascus, where he completed his primary education.  He then became a teacher for displaced Palestinian children in a refugee camp, where he began writing short stories in order to help his students contextualize their situation.  His literary style has been described as "lucid and straightforward"; his modernist narrative technique—using flashback effects and a wide range of narrative voices—represented a distinct advance in Arabic fiction.

His novella, MEN IN THE SUN (1962), was published to great critical acclaim and has been described as "one of the most admired and quoted works in modern Arabic fiction."  The story is an allegory of Palestinian calamity in the wake of the 1948 Nakba (lit. "The Catastrophe") in its description of the defeatist despair, passivity, and political corruption infesting the lives of Palestinians in refugee camps. 

ALL THAT'S LEFT TO YOU (1966) presented the vivid story of twenty-four hours in the real and remembered lives of a brother and sister living in Gaza and separated from their family.  The desert and time emerge as characters as Kanafani speaks through the desert, the brother, and the sister to build the powerful rhythm of the narrative.  The Palestinian attachment to land and family, and the sorrow over their loss, are symbolized by the young man’s unremitting anger and shame over his sister’s sexual disgrace.

In the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Kanafani reversed his earlier period of pessimism in favor of more active struggle.  He joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and became its spokesman, coming to prominence as a political thinker, militant, and journalist.  In 1969, he drafted a PFLP program in which the movement officially took up Marxism-Leninism, which marked a departure from pan-Arab nationalism towards revolutionary Palestinian struggle.

The impact of Kanafani's new revolutionary outlook is explicit in the novella UMM SA'AD (1969) in which he creates a portrait of a mother who encourages her son to take up arms as a resistance fedayeen in full awareness that the choice might result in his death.  To my knowledge it has never been translated in full into English, but two excerpts are included in this collection.  The need to recover the past, the lost homeland, by action is also explored in the lyrical and tragic novella and stories in PALESTINE'S CHILDREN (2000).  Although they emerged form the author's keen understanding of a bitter political situation, their deeper gift is to reveal in literature the plight of oppressed peoples everywhere.

ON ZIONIST LITERATURE (1967) makes an incisive analysis of the literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine.  Interweaving his literary criticism of works by George Eliot, Arthur Koestler, and others with a historical materialist narrative, Kanafani identifies the political intent and ideology of Zionist literature, demonstrating how the myths used to justify the domination of Palestine first emerged and were repeatedly propagated in popular literary works.

In July 1972, Ghassan Kanafani was killed in Beirut by the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, when his booby-trapped car exploded. 


In addition to the following English translations, I have also chosen to include the Arabic edition of Kanafani's complete works, published by Rimal Publications in Cyprus (16 volumes, 2013–2015):

== FICTION ==

* All That’s Left to You: A Novella & Short Stories (Interlink, 2004) – PDF
* Men in the Sun & Other Stories [tr. Kilpatrick] (Three Continents, 1997) – PDF
* Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories [tr. Harlow & Riley] (Rienner, 2000) – PDF

== NON-FICTION ==

* On Zionist Literature [tr. Najib] (Ebb Books, 2022) – ePub + PDF
* The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine (CDP, 2016) – PDF

== COLLECTED WORKS (ARABIC) ==

غسان كنفاني - أرض البرتقال الحزين-منشورات الرمال (2013)
غسان كنفاني - أم سعد-منشورات الرمال (2013)
غسان كنفاني - الأدب الفلسطيني المقاوم تحت الاحتلال 1948 - 1968-منشورات الرمال (2015)
غسان كنفاني - الباب-منشورات الرمال (2014)
غسان كنفاني - الشيء الآخر - من قتل ليلى الحايك؟-منشورات الرمال (2014)
غسان كنفاني - العاشق-منشورات الرمال (2014)
غسان كنفاني - القبعة و النبي-منشورات الرمال (2014)
غسان كنفاني - القميص المسروق-منشورات الرمال (2015)
غسان كنفاني - جسر إلى الأبد-منشورات الرمال (2013)
غسان كنفاني - رجال في الشمس-منشورات الرمال (2015)
غسان كنفاني - عائد إلى حيفا-منشورات الرمال (2015)
غسان كنفاني - عالم ليس لنا-منشورات الرمال (2014)
غسان كنفاني - عن الرجال و البنادق-منشورات الرمال (2014)
غسان كنفاني - في الأدب الصهيوني-منشورات الرمال (2015)
غسان كنفاني - ما تبقى لكم-منشورات الرمال (2014)
غسان كنفاني - موت سرير رقم 12-منشورات الرمال (2014)

Please seed and share with others. :)