Abbas Beydoun
Translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss
Paper $16.95
| 978-0-8156-0912-4
| 2008
Winner of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and
Islamic Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award 2007
Description
Widely known throughout the Arab world as a leading poet, journalist, and literary critic, Abbas Beydoun’s writing is infused with the politics and culture of his native Lebanon. In Blood Test, his first novel, Beydoun recounts the efforts of a young man to explore his own history and identity through his encounters with the family and friends who surround him. The sudden death of his father prompts him to follow the physical and psychological traces he left behind, a journey that raises as many questions as it answers. The young man’s search for a sense of belonging and rootedness leads him both forward and back as the narration travels in time and place over two continents and several generations.
Max Weiss’s fluid translation effortlessly conveys Beydoun’s impassioned language and textured storytelling. Blood Test is a passport to places both real and imagined, leaving readers enriched by their travels.
Author
Abbas Beydoun is the author of eleven collections of poetry and one novel.
He is the cultural editor of the cultural supplement of the Beirut daily newspaper As-Safir.
Max Weiss is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
6 x 9, 136 pages
|
Syracuse University Press
