NEW YORK: Ta-Nehisi Coates in Conversation, Nov. 10

We still have a few tickets, both in-person and streaming, available for our event, America and the War on Palestine, this coming Sunday, November 10, at Riverside Church, where we are hosting a remarkable group of writers in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates:

• Rabea Eghbariah, Farah Barqawi, Sahar Qawasmi, and Nida Sinnokrot, focusing on the ongoing colonization of Palestine from Gaza to the Galilee, tracing its impact from 1897 to today.

• Noura Erakat and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on thinking beyond the state in the wake of the U.S. presidential election.

Doors at 2pm for 3pm start.

Boycott Update: 6000+ Writers Refuse Complicity

The number of writers who have pledged to boycott Israeli publishers and literary institutions that are complicit in Israel’s genocide and its underlying apartheid regime continues to grow.

High profile authors who have added their names over the past several days include John Cusack, Robert Macfarlane, Michael Rosen, Jesmyn Ward, Katie Kitamura, Benjamin Moser, Helen Macdonald, Kiese Laymon, Akwaeke Emezi, Chris Kraus, Merve Emre, Yuri Herrera, Paul B. Preciado, Rob Delaney, Anne Waldman, Deborah Eisenberg, Mark Haddon, Ronan Bennett, Jeff Halper, Kevin Barry, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Damon Galgut, Aleksandar Hemon, Laila Lalami, Annie Baker, Sapphire, Robin Coste Lewis, Tom McCarthy, Saul Williams, Daniel Alarcón, and Greta Thunberg.

Read more at Lithub.

LONDON: Palestine Film Festival, 15-29 November

The London Palestine Film Festival is coming up on 15-29 November, with screenings in cinemas across London.

Opening with A Grain of Sand, a live performance by Elias Matar inspired by true events, the festival features more than a dozen films old and new, including the UK premiere of From Ground Zero, a portmanteau of 22 short films made in Gaza over the past year.

You can find the full line-up and purchase tickets for screenings here.

Book of the Week

Urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights. Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony. Abu Toha's work begs the reader to pay close attention as each poetic line is, at its heart, a lifeline to survival.

Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate, author of The Hurting Kind

Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.

Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid and lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges and his daughter’s joy in eating them. Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us.

Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination — even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.

Forest of Noise is Mosab Abu Toha’s first book to be published in the UK. It is available today from 4th Estate in the UK, and from Knopf in North America.

Reading Roundup

‘I couldn’t cry over my children like everyone else’: the Tragedy of Palestinian Journalist Wael al-Dahdouh - Nesrine Malik profiles Wael al-Dahdouh, who became an early emblem of the human toll that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was taking on journalists.

Liberal Values - Ahdaf Soueif refutes the notion that ‘a free exchange of ideas’ is the path out of this genocide, forcefully advocating for the need to engage in boycott.

What to the Arab American Is Election Day - Writing on the eve of the American election, Lena Tuffaha appraises the real meaning of the day: “A Tuesday in the second November of the Genocide /
The thirtieth day of total siege on Jabalia.”

A Glass of Water, a Burning Boy: Fady Joudah on Images From Gaza - Doctor and poet Fady Joudah grapples with the images of Shaban al-Dalou and his family burning to death in their hospital beds.

Before World War II, Zionism Was a Fringe Ideology - Clare Lemlich reviews a new book, The Radical Jewish Tradition, which explores the dominance of non-Zionist and anti-Zionist movements among Jews in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

‘I Don’t Want to Forget Who I Am’ - Mahmoud Al-Shaer, an editor, curator, poet, and cultural organizer from Gaza, shares excerpts of his diary, which captures the brutality of life in southern Gaza. You can support his crowdfunding campaign for his family here.

Back the Books Boycott - Arguing that “writers are also workers,” Francesca Newton makes the case that the best thing writers can do is withhold their labor from literary institutions complicit in Israel’s genocide and the apartheid regime.

Beyond Jabalia: Netanyahu’s ‘Escaping Forward’ Strategy - Mahmoud Hadhoud and Sari Orabi spell out Israel’s emergent strategy of imposing military governance and securitized surveillance to counteract the agility and flexibility of insurgent cells in Gaza.

Palestinian Artists Reflect on the Role of Art in Catastrophic Times - Nina Hubinet profiles five artists at the Eighth Biennale of Video Art and Performance in Exile in France who position their art in relation to the struggle for Palestinian freedom.