Touch by Adania Shibli

featuring Nadia Yaqub, Professor and Chair of Asian Studies

Meeting Date: Tuesday, May 14

“Celebrated young Palestinian writer Shibli – a playwright, author and essayist now located in the UK – makes her American debut with an exquisite, powerful novella that transports readers to her West Bank homeland. Like a great volume of poetry, [Touch] has rhythm and unexpected momentum, and cries for re-reading.”—Publishers Weekly

“Shibli breaks with the traditions of modern Arabic fiction, creating a work that has been and will continue to be hailed across literatures. Here every ordinary word, ordinary action is a small stone dropped into water: of inevitable consequence. We find ourselves mesmerized one quiet ripple at a time.”—Amazon

“Touch purrs along like an extended prose poem – all words and sounds and images – as Shibli picks up the glinting fragments of the girl’s experience, then turns them over in her hand to see how they refract the light of a world so radically constricted and reduced.”—The National (United Arab Emirates)

“Adania Shibli’s American debut is a visually striking composition of interconnected prose poem-like vignettes that follow a young girl living on the West Bank of Palestine. Through the book’s polished and fluid prose, sensory details are foregrounded over the trajectory of narrative sense-making, and the circumstantial themes of the text (family life, love, death, political strife) unfold the way a narrative might enter into one’s experience of a painting—their impacts permeate throughout the text, but rarely are they explicitly depicted or referenced.”—The Quarterly Conversation

Register online or call 919.962.1544

Please note that the image may not reflect the edition being used for the reading group.