A review by David Ulin for the Los Angeles Times, February 8th, 2019
“If you really want to erase or distort a story,” Khaled Khalifa declares in his astonishing new novel “Death Is Hard Work,” “you should turn it into several different stories with different endings and plenty of incidental details.” He’s referring to the salutary comforts of narrative. This — or so we like to reassure ourselves — is one reason we turn to literature: as a balm, an expression of the bonds that bring us together, rather than the …

Starred review by Kirkus, November 2018

Insistent, memorable portrait of the small indignities and large horrors of the civil war in Syria. A native of the Aleppo district, Khalifa—well-known in the Arabic-reading world but new to most American readers and a winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature—here writes of a family both joined and torn apart by death. The paterfamilias knows that his passing is imminent: The first sentence reads, “Two hours before he died, Abdel Latif al-Salim looked his son Bolbol straight in the eye with as much of …

Published by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 11, 2018

In a night-black novel Khaled Khalifa carries the dreams of his homeland to the graveA man named Nightingale. He would have to be a singer and a lover fluttering through a scenario of magical realism or an old Oriental poem. Not one, however, to whom the concern for the corpse of his father, who is already decaying, gives the feeling that he is still a creature capable of being found with a little backbone, and not merely “jelly-mass.”

Published by Literatur Spiegel, May 2018
A crazy journey with a corpse through a country at war: Khaled Khalifa’s Syrian novel Death Is Hard Work
 
It is very easy to tell stories during wartime. One is surrounded by monstrosities, every day a new one.
And something else – which can be found in Syrian author Khaled Khalifa’s new novel, Death Is Hard Work, now available in German.

Published by The Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 26, 2018

Renowned Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa lives in Damascus to this day. In his novel “Death Is Hard Work”, he tells of a country where the people’s survival depends on the mood of the soldiers.

Below is an excerpt of a piece Khaled Khalifa wrote for Corriere della sera, March 2016
During my trip from Damascus to Boston, I found myself reflecting on Syria, giving it one last look. I imagined it calm, and strong; it made me think of so many things. Before leaving it for a whole year, I needed to express all these feelings. I am convinced that, despite the huge amount of destruction, Syria, my country, can still elicit an avalanche of positive adjectives.