Literature and War: Conversations with Israeli and Palestinian Writers: this book is available as a new member gift“Runo Isaksen’s book is unique in its ability to make us understand without judjing, to connect emotionally without patronizing, and to make some sharp and lucid sense from one of the most obscure and strange regions in the world. His book should be on the reading list of any person who wants to transcend clichés and seeks to find the real people who live and ache in the Middle East.”

—Etgar Keret

Readers of this anthology are invited to take part in a wonderfully honest and candid dialogue between several respected authors on the Israel-Palestine conflict. As Runo Isaksen argues in his introduction, “This book is not about politics—at least, not in the narrowest sense. It evolved from my own experience of reading page upon page about the Middle East, year in and year out, one moment full of hope and the next filled with despair, muttering to myself: ‘There will bever be peace in the Middle East!’”

Isaksen had traveled to Egypt in the late 1990s, and to Syria in 2000 (both times on artistic scholarships), but he'd never been to Israel or the West Bank. Newly intrigued, he decided to go there and interview Israelis and Palestinians and gather some impressions of the conflict. Isaksen visited the region during the Second Intifada, meeting with some 20 leading Israeli and Palestinian writers—among them, Amos Oz and David Grossman, Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish, and feminist writer Sahar Khalifeh—in their homes, and in the cafes of Tel Aviv and Ramallah.  He undertook these interviews with one key question: Can literature play a role in helping one side to see the other? Literature and War chronicles 14 of these conversations. These dialogues—urgent, humorous, despairing and hopeful—are themselves a first step toward peace.

"The result is a number of sharp insights into the process, promise and limits of art in the face of war...This inquisitive guide illuminates the region in a fresh way, giving those already interested a new perspective and drawing in readers who might otherwise eschew modern Middle East history."

-Publishers Weekly

Runo Isaksen lives in Bergen, Norway. He has a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Norway, and has published four novels about modern Norwegian life.