Adania Shibli (1974, Palestine) has been writing novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays, which were published in various anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines in different languages. Her latest novel Minor Detail was published in the US by New Directions in 2020, in a translation by Elisabeth Jacquette, and has been translated into many languages, most recently into German (published by Berenberg Verlag). Minor Detail was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic and Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
"An explosive double-telling of a single crime story.... The
extreme economies of Shibli's style—blending aphorism and
enigma, dry humor and searing critique—recall the novellas of César
Aira and Mario Bellatin. In the act of writing such an evocative,
tightly wrought fiction, in her invention of such a complex,
fighting character who is at once the victim’s double and the
author’s stand-in, Shibli not only reflects the deadening
conditions of occupation. She also, crucially, transcends the
damage they have done."
*4Columns*
"Shibli crafts a story that connects strangers to one another
through the occupation that has shaped their
lives. Nerve-racking and eye-opening."
*Arab News*
""Like an affidavit in its egalitarian specificity—every detail of
every character’s action is accounted for, and therefore
scrutinized. A starkly poetic accounting of a crime, its burial,
and its exhumation.""
*Alia Persico-Shammas - Community Bookstore*
"In Adania Shibli's subversively quiet, compelling Minor
Detail, threads of connection are embodied in a young woman's
quest to find almost erased history. Written in spare, careful
language (praise also to translator Elisabeth Jaquette), Shibli
helps reclaim what would be obliterated by forces actively at work
yet today, doing so with a narrative masterfully carrying both
surprise and inevitability within. This book has devastation and
loss to a shattering, wrenching degree, and yet. Yes, and yet."
*Rick Simonson - Elliott Bay Book Company*
"Shibli has created a powerful set of dual heroines, women wracked
with disquiet and violence, resisting the frames that have first,
been chosen for them, then denied to have ever existed. This is an
astonishing, major book."
*John Freeman - Lithub*
"An intense and penetrating work about the profound impact of
living with violence—Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation
by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet
control."
*Katie da Cunha Lewin - Los Angeles Review of Books*
"Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of
counterhistory or whodunit—a rescue of the victim’s story from
military courts and Israeli newspapers—it turns out to be something
stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or
a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of
history, the past as a recurring trauma....For Shibli, the
emblematic experience of occupation is the longue durée of ennui
and isolation rather than the dramatic moment of crisis."
*Robyn Creswell - New York Review of Books*
"A palpable sense of dread pulses beneath Minor
Detail. In Elisabeth Jaquette’s fine translation from Arabic,
Shibli asks how we can account for and understand major crimes, by
looking more closely for the details that escape."
*Prospect Magazine*
"Startling, cinematic: Shibli’s masterly, acidic work of subtle
symbolism and plot symmetry gives no access to the thoughts of the
Israeli soldiers or their victim, making the Palestinian woman’s
subsequent first-person narration all the more arresting. This is a
remarkable exercise in dramatizing a desire for justice."
*Publishers Weekly*
"Exquisitely powerful: though focused on the finest details—flakes
of rust against skin, the softness of grass—Shibli takes readers to
the center of a family and a culture, using the same careful,
dispassionate observation to report everyday events like the
father’s shaving as she does to depict the death of a sibling in
area violence. Like a great volume of poetry, Shibli’s prose has
rhythm and unexpected momentum, and cries for rereading."
*Publishers Weekly*
"The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smouldering, until it
is shining off the page...The book is, at every turn, dangerously
and devastatingly good."
*The Guardian*
"Palestinian Adania Shibli’s cinematic novel stages a return of the
repressed on a national scale by reposing an atrocity committed by
Israeli soldiers in the Negev region in 1949. An unflinching
account of violence and dehumanisation—Shibli breaks new ground.
She uses a lyrical, intensely sensory mode to describe how we
identify with figures from the past, and especially the restless
dead. Brutal, hypnotic and haunting."
*Mireille Juchau - The Monthly*
"What links these two stories? Borders, of course, but also some
weird echoes. The woman from Ramallah sneaks into Israel to find
out more, for there may be 'nothing more important than this little
detail, if one wants to arrive at the complete truth.’ Shibli
delicately suggests that the 'complete truth' of the
crime [in Minor Detail] might never be found out,
that perhaps the details in the two stories mirror each other
because the past isn’t even past."
*Yu Miri - The New York Times Book Review*
"The dead are ever present in Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail.
Indirectly through multiple narrators, Shibli constructs a
meditation on brutality, war, memory and the collective suffering
of the Palestinian people in this chilling novel in which the
legacy of violence remains unresolved."
*Lauren LeBlanc - The Observer*
"A blistering allegory about state violence and the conscription of
women’s bodies. In its minor details, Shibli's novel offers a
piercing account of everyday life for Palestinians living under
Israeli occupation. The translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is
superb. Minor Detail is a credo for revolution, a major
book: tense, propulsive and timely."
*Emily Stewart - The Saturday Paper*
"Minor Detail can be read as the blackest of black comedies, in
orbit about tragedy as rings around a dark planet. The abject is
the centre of gravity here, and we may only approach so close
before words themselves are crushed."
*The Sydney Morning Herald*
"A short but powerful novel. Shibli interrogates a world of
unstable and shifting boundaries and borders, from the Negev Desert
a year after the 1948 war to a contemporary version of the tightly
controlled lands of Palestine and Israel. Dreamlike, haunting
prose."
*World Literature Today*
"The most talked-about writer on the West Bank."
*Ahdaf Soueif*
"Adania Shibli takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key
event in her novel – the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman –
to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators – an Israeli psychopath
and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale – but her
method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches
its heart-stopping conclusion."
*J. M. Coetzee*
"Adania Shibli’s exceptional novel Minor Detail belongs
to the genre of the novel as resistance, as revolutionary text.
Simultaneously depicting the dehumanisation that surrounds rape and
land-grab, it is a text that palpitates with fear and with outrage.
As we join the nameless young woman in her quest to find the truth
of a long-forgotten atrocity, we realize how dangerous it is to
reclaim life and history in the face of ongoing, systematic
erasure. The narrative tempo, that eventually reaches a crescendo,
astutely captures how alienation and heightened anxiety are
elemental states of living under Israeli occupation. This is the
political novel we have all been waiting for."
*Meena Kandasamy*
"An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is
continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral
intelligence, political passion, and formal virtuosity."
*Pankaj Mishra*
"A quiet, searching, precise observer—Adania Shibli deserves to be
better known."
*Qantara.de*
"This short book got under my skin when I first read it and has
haunted me ever since. The austere prose in this magnificent
translation throws a pitiless, impassive air over every page, where
murder is dealt with as impersonally as a pack of chewing gum."
*Leri Price - Words Without Borders*
"[A] harrowing account of a crime that takes place in the
aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war known as the Nakba (catastrophe or
disaster) to Palestinians...Anyone interested in better
understanding life in the Occupied Territories needs to read this
powerful tale."
*John Fulton - Lit Hub*
"The power in the syntax and diction—the pulsing lyricism in its
raw realities—reminds me of how central poetry is to the prose of
Palestinian storytellers."
*Sarah Schulman - Bookforum*
"A mind-changing revelation of how the past and the present
converge on Palestinian life, achieved through craft, character
voice, and time travel expertly realized by the author."
*Porochista Khakpour - Bookforum*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |