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 Avvenire, March 20, 2018
In his work the Syrian writer can not break away from the tormented city: “Despite everything, mine has never been a country prone to fanaticism: plural identity is an ancient value.”

Published by Il Manifesto, March 28, 2018
The novel about a prisoner’s life, a prisoner of violence but also of the thousand unpardonable compromises that a dictatorship imposes on oppressed individuals. There are no knives in the kitchens of this city (Bompiani, pp. 288, euro 18), tells through the life events of a family in Aleppo the genesis and consolidation of the Assad regime that dominates Syria since the Sixties, describing the internal repression and annihilation, which invites us to reflect on all forms of contemporary despotism.

Published by Ansa Med, March 19, 2018
“We would have liked the government to listen to us, to open up a new path for human rights and a better life, but we were a group of deluded, dreamers: we did not understand that it is not allowed for Arabs to enjoy democracy” . So the Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa spoke of the first hopes of change nourished by the demonstrations in the square of March 2011, then resulted in repression and in the last, tragic seven years of war.

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.”