Beirut by Barrack Zailaa Rima

Barrack Zailaa Rima’s celebrated graphic novel trilogy, gathered together and available in English for the first time. “Full of rewarding fissures and detours, embracing every complication and every contradiction that comes up. A brilliant political portrait of a city.”—Michael DeForge, author of Birds of Maine Beirut is an intimate and poetic look at a beloved city that is at once autobiographical, documentary, and fantastic in nature. In Rima’s hands, Beirut is a labyrinth of alleyways and stories, a theater teeming with revolts, and a cenotaph to buried memories. With Rima and her family serving as our guides, and through chance encounters with incongruous figures (a librarian, a garbage collector—or the city’s last storyteller), we discover a city that longs for its Golden Age even as it is transformed by neoliberal forces in the aftermath of the Civil War—an evolution whose future remains uncertain. Dreamlike, tender, and ever-attentive to the beauty of the line, Beirut offers a g