Cockroach

Literature & Fiction

RAWI HAGE

Genre Fiction

Penguin

In Montreal's restless immigrant community, our unnamed narrator is living in despair. Forced to visit a therapist after a suicide attempt, he brings us back to his childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal, where he imagines himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him. Cockroach is a carnivalesque, philosophical novel that weaves dark humor with an accusatory, satirical voice, spawning from the subsurface to challenge humanity and its downfall.

Hamish Hamilton

This Book is Brand new international softcover edition delivered within 7-12 working days via UPS/USPS/DHL and FEDEX.(FOR SALE ONLY U.S. & U.K.)

Carnival

Penguin??Books

Literary

Penguin Books, Ltd.

LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEFINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTIONFINALIST FOR THE ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZEAn explosive new novel from the award-winning, bestselling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach, and only the second Canadian (after Alistair Macleod) to win the prestigious Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.It is 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, partway through that country's Civil War. On a torn-up street overlooking a cemetery in the city's Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approached by a colourful member of the mysterious Hellfire Society--a secret group to which his father had belonged. The Society's purpose is to arrange burial or cremation for those who for various reasons have been outcast and abandoned by family, clergy and state. Pavlov agrees to take up his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and fading community, bearing witness to its enduring rituals as well as its inevitable decline.Deftly combining comedy with tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is at once propulsive, elegiac, outrageous, profane and transcendent--a profoundly moving meditation on what it means to live through war. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and imminent death. Here is an exhilarating, subversive, beautiful and timely new work that reinforces Rawi Hage's status as one of our most original, necessary, fearless and important writers.

BEIRUT HELLFIRE SOCIETY

Humor & Satire

Knopf Canada

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEFrom the internationally acclaimed author of the novels De Niro’s Game , Cockroach , Carnival and Beirut Hellfire Society , here is a captivating and cosmopolitan collection of stories.In Montreal, a photographer’s unexpected encounter with actress Sophia Loren leads to a life-altering revelation about his dead mother. In Beirut, a disillusioned geologist eagerly awaits the destruction that will come with an impending tsunami. In Tokyo, a Jordanian academic delivering a lecture at a conference receives haunting news from the Persian Gulf. And in Berlin, a Lebanese writer forms a fragile, fateful bond with his voluble German neighbours.The irresistible characters in Stray Dogs lead radically different lives, but all are restless travelers, moving between states—nation-states and states of mind—seeking connection, escaping the past and following delicate threads of truth, only to experience the sometimes shocking, sometimes amusing and often random ways our fragile modern identities are constructed, destroyed, and reborn. Politically astute, philosophically wise, humane, relevant and caustically funny, these stories reveal the singular vision of award-winning writer Rawi Hage at his best.

Stray Dogs: Stories

DeNiro's Game

anansi

House Of Anansi

Literary short stories by established and emerging writers. Excerpts:
 Terrence Cheng The Merchant All familiar faces, part of a community that worked and lived and fought and struggled together, some behind open doors, some behind closed. Many from the same clans back in Guangdong, so that even here in New York there was a sense of home, of living a familiar life while still dreaming a new one.
 Vauhini Vara We'll Rise Above the Sky "I sometimes think if Dad and I had split up earlier, Priya wouldn't have gotten sick," she says. "What do you think?" "That's not true," I say. "Nothing is related. People just invent causes and effects where they don't exist. Things just happen."
 Adam Theron-Lee Rensch A Day in the Life John can only think of Sean, waiting at home. He needs to get back to see him, to not be the type of father who isn't near when his child falls asleep.
 Rawi Hage Interview by Jeremiah Chamberlin To capture the real, transform it into a believable fiction, is a bizarre process. Blurred. The delusion in my writing is just accentuated to a form of overt madness and the exploration of madness. Violence is a form of madness; so is the poetic and the creative.
 Selena Anderson Here Come the Brides But in what my father called a real moment of lunacy, he married my mother and became someone's husband again. There were four moments of that, four wives altogether.
 John Stazinski Bangor At thirteen some boys give up church. But we were never a church family. Instead I gave up these weekend trips to see my felon father. Both are ways of rebelling, but also, I suppose, ways of seeing sleight of hand where magic once was.
 Amy S. Gottfried Chim, Chiminy Even the older kids seemed to have jam all over their hands. Not that he was sorry about any of them. He just never planned on spending the bulk of his adult life walking around with a soggy sponge in his fist.
 Sam Ruddick Flight He scrutinized my face for a second, then leaned back, smiled, and shook his head. "No," he said. "I don't think you have the first idea what you're up against. In fact, I'm one-hundred-percent certain that there is no way you could possibly know what's in store for you."
 Michael Schiavone Wackers While fresh omelets sound nice, chickens are for farmers. Besides, I'm a dog person; at least I was until Barney passed last May. The guys at the VFW always pester me about getting a puppy, but I can't imagine playing fetch with a stranger.
 Gabriel Brownstein Kiss Him Goodnight He would come inside the kitchen window, call an ambulance, and then dry off. And before the ambulance came, he would write Lila Diamond a letter. He would tell her about this night, about all the foolish things he had done while trying to get to Brooklyn to kiss her.
 Diane Chang The Teacher and the Revolution Teng felt as if a pound of his own flesh had been carved out of him; waves of loss opened up in him, an ocean of loss.

Glimmer Train Stories, #79

Michael Schiavone

Diane Chang

Adam Theron-Lee Rensch

Terrence Cheng

Vauhini Vara

Selena Anderson

John Stazinski

Amy S. Gottfried

Sam Ruddick

Sara Whyatt

Gabriel Brownstein

Jeremiah Chamberlin (interviewer)

Short Stories & Anthologies

Glimmer Train Press, Inc.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. In Rawi Hage's unforgettable novel, winner of the 2008 IMPAC Prize, this famous quote by Camus becomes a touchstone for two young men caught in Lebanon's civil war. Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown to adulthood in war torn Beirut. Now they must choose their futures: to stay in the city and consolidate power through crime; or to go into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known. Bassam chooses one path: obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to finance his departure. Meanwhile, George builds his power in the underworld of the city and embraces a life of military service, crime for profit, killing, and drugs . 
Told in the voice of Bassam, De Niro's Game is a beautiful, explosive portrait of a contemporary young man shaped by a lifelong experience of war. Rawi Hage's brilliant style mimics a world gone mad: so smooth and apparently sane that its razor-sharp edges surprise and cut deeply. A powerful meditation on life and death in a war zone, and what comes after.

De Niro's Game

House of Anansi Press

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