Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
Edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman
More than two dozen celebrated writers bear witness to fifty years of occupation, in an anthology produced with Breaking the Silence.
To mark fifty years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, novelists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman — working with Breaking the Silence, the organization of Israeli army veterans — brought more than two dozen writers to Israel and the occupied territories to see the occupation up close and write about what they found. The resulting anthology gathers essays by Dave Eggers, Colm Tóibín, Colum McCann, Madeleine Thien, Eimear McBride, Taiye Selasi, Geraldine Brooks, and Hari Kunzru, among others, alongside Palestinian voices, on subjects ranging from checkpoints, home demolitions, and administrative detention to Hebron’s shuttered center and daily life in Gaza. The contributors are storytellers rather than Middle East experts, and the book’s wager is that witness matters: fifty years of military rule, described plainly, needs no editorializing. It remains one of the most widely read literary testaments to the occupation.
About the editors
Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and other novels. Ayelet Waldman is a novelist and essayist, the author of A Really Good Day and Bad Mother. They are married and live in Berkeley, California.
Details
- Published by Harper Perennial, New York, 2017
- Produced in collaboration with Breaking the Silence
- ISBN 9780062431783
The edition
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