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Zusatztext Praise for The Angel of History : Winner of the Northern California Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, and the Arab American Book Award for Fiction A Washington Independent Review of Books , Literary Hub , and Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year “Alameddine, entrancing and unflinching, is in easy command of his bricolage narrative, and he leavens its tragedy with wit.” — New York Times Book Review “An elegy for a lost generation of gay men [and] a structurally inventive bildungsroman . . . The Angel of History marks the triumph of memory over oblivion.” — Bookforum “The narrative spans every corner of the globe to reveal a razor-sharp mind in turmoil, reflecting a wider consciousness of the social unrest around him.” — Harper’s Bazaar online “ The Angel of History takes place in a single day, but it reads like an epic . . . a sprawling fever dream of a novel, by turns beautiful and horrifying, and impossible to forget . . . Alameddine is a writer with a boundless imagination . . . [his] writing is so beautiful, so exuberant . . . When Alameddine aims for the heart, he doesn’t miss, and he hits hard . . . The Angel of History isn’t just a brilliant novel, it’s a heartfelt cry in the dark, a reminder that we can never forget our past, the friends and family we’ve loved and lost. It’s a raw love letter from those who survived a plague to those who didn’t.” —NPR.org “A remarkable novel, a commentary of love and death, creativity and spirituality, memory and survival . . . brilliant . . . [it] hits an emotional nerve.” — Los Angeles Review of Books “Excellent, lissome . . . the novel is a work of social and cultural memorialization . . . The Angel of History suggests that to be alienated—from past love and from the past itself—is to open the door to memory and creation . . . to read Alameddine’s prose is to see loss, if not mastered, then at least made into lively and living art.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Laced with literary references . . . a kaleidoscopic storytelling style, and philosophical humor.” — New Yorker “A poignant act of remembering by one AIDS survivor to a new generation . . . an evocative religious and sexual elegiac with both dark and stirring comedy . . . a poetic combination of Mapplethorpean imagery and religious symbolism. It’s uncomfortable and enlightening; an experiment in merging the present with the past, in merging a gay life characterized by assimilation with a gay life celebratory of its deviancy. It dances between the ecstasy of sexual release and the ecstasy of religious rapture . . . an unforgettable novel. The Angel of History is cathartic tale of outsiders and insiders and what’s lost in becoming each.” — PopMatters “This is a story of one life and many themes: in this case, death and sex; religion; war; the purpose of art and of love and loss; and the need to remember. Here is a book, full of story, unrepentantly political at every level. At a time when many western writers seem to be in retreat from saying anything that could be construed as political, Alameddine says it all, shamelessly, gloriously.” — Guardian “Alameddine has created a scintillating, original work whose moral complexity and detail of observation are wholly contemporary and entirely his own.” — Spectator “Alameddine has beguiled us with his insight and compassion. His stories take the reader into ...
