Seven books about the power of political imagination

Mai Serhan is the author of CAIRO: the undelivered letters, winner of the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award and I Can Imagine It For Us, a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize. Her writing has appeared in The London Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Magma Poetry, The Oxford Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and elsewhere.

At Electric Lit Serhan tagged seven titles about the power of political imagination. One book on the list:

House of Stone by Anthony Shadid

This memoir caught me off guard. I began reading it at Beirut airport and was in tears within the first few pages. Leaving Beirut is always emotionally charged for me. It’s my family’s adopted home following their exile from Palestine, the city of my father’s youth, and where my aunt, the last surviving member of our Nakba generation, still lives, though she now has dementia. In this elegantly written memoir, Shadid returns to his ancestral home in Southern Lebanon, once a splendid Ottoman structure, now destroyed by Israeli bombardment, to rebuild it. The act of rebuilding becomes a meditation on memory, ancestry, migration to America, and the destruction wrought by occupation and war. In my memoir, I too rebuild my ancestral home, word by word, as a way to meditate on loss and return. Like Matar, Shadid showed me how a sentence can carry grief, and still land in grace.

Read about another entry on the list.

House of Stone is among Naji Bakhti's top ten books about Lebanon and Tatjana Soli's six favorite books that conjure exotic locales.

--Marshal Zeringue