About the Book
"Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing." --Rashid Khalidi, New York Times bestselling author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
From the award-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative
Nine days before October 7, 2023, award-winning author Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. The text of Hammad's seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognizing the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.
About the Author :
Isabella Hammad is the author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost. The Parisian won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree and named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Enter Ghost won the 2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, among other prizes. The winner of the Plimpton Prize for Fiction and an O. Henry Prize, she has been awarded literary fellowships from the Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, and the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Review :
Praise for Recognizing the Stranger
Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Criticism
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Most Anticipated Politics & Current Events Title for Fall
A Most Anticipated Book of from Literary Hub and Kirkus Reviews
"Simultaneously scholarly and righteously impassioned." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing." -- Rashid Khalidi, New York Times bestselling author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
"Recognizing the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose. This is a book that calls us to witness our place in history. Isabella Hammad deserves our thanks for sharing it with the world." -- Sally Rooney, author of Beautiful World, Where Are You
"An urgent work for a devastating time, Recognizing the Stranger proves that Isabella Hammad is as fine a critic as she is a novelist. Following in the tradition of Edward Said, she demands an ethical, political, and artistic confrontation with the text, the world, and the other. It is hardly a surprise that she is one of our most astute writers when it comes to Palestine." -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
"Animated by an extraordinary faith in the power of art to return us to the human in ourselves and each other, Recognizing the Stranger is a profound exploration of myth, meaning, the novel, the Palestinian struggle, and the work of Edward W. Said. The insights she finds into the present moment feel at once prescient and eternal and the result left me changed." -- Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
"A pitch perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away, but to see ourselves." -- Max Porter, author of Shy
"Recognizing the Stranger marks an uncharted terrain of literary critique in the shadow of Edward Said, revealing abundant insight about both the method and the intellectual. In this powerful revelation, Isabella Hammad triumphantly teaches us about anagorisis and produces a work that is its embodiment. A moving read characterized by its timelessness and the precision with which it speaks to this historical moment." -- Noura Erakat
"Thought-provoking and timely, [Recognizing the Stranger] celebrates Said's intellectual courage and enduring relevance while highlighting the cruelty in which Palestinians continue to live. Combining both her literary skill and acute power of observation, Hammad weaves together a diagnostic and powerful essay which will undoubtedly be appreciated for years to come." -- Diana Buttu
"A vital and devastating read, Hammad's voice is a fiery illumination in the darkness." -- Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters
"Hammad's writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change." -- Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road
"Hammad's lecture focuses on the moment in fiction when a character learns something and everything changes. They might, like Odysseus, discover some horrible truths about their familial origins. Or they might just experience a moment of epiphany about the world, when something they've known in their gut has finally made its way into their head . . . This past year has made me reevaluate everything I thought I knew about Israel as a Jewish person in America, just as MeToo made me reconsider professional relationships that I thought were okay at the time. My biggest realization is not that Israel is culpable, but to what extremes so many American Jews will go to in order to avoid looking." -- Maris Kriezman, The Maris Review
Praise for Enter Ghost
"Isabella Hammad is a master of subtle nuance." -- New York Times
"[Hammad] is at once able to trace broad social and historical terrains without losing her grasp of particulars, giving a surgical finesse to her writing about the human personality. Her style is often labeled 'exquisite.' These skills put her in the company of other postcolonial literary novelists such as Ahdaf Soueif and Abraham Verghese." -- Washington Post
"Hammad is not only a talented novelist; she is also a rigorous researcher, and she paints an authentic picture of Palestinian life, whether it takes place inside Israel or in the West Bank . . . In Enter Ghost, Hammad navigates between the personal and the political in what has come to be her signally seamless manner. She moves across these borders often, almost as if they did not exist." -- Raja Shehadeh, The Nation
"Assured and formidable." -- Wall Street Journal
"Terrific . . . Enter Ghost though contemporary, is thoroughly infused with Palestine's past -- and thoroughly haunted by Sonia's. Hammad, who is both a delicate writer and an exact one, intertwines the two, taking care to give Sonia as many personal ghosts as she does historical ones . . . Indeed, the novel seems to argue, real growth and connection, both political and personal, cannot begin until everyone's ghosts have emerged from hiding. Art is, if nothing else, a powerful tool for coaxing them out." -- New York Times Book Review
"[Hammad is] a calm and vital storyteller, a writer of real rhythmic grace." -- Ali Smith, The Guardian
"Can a work of art act upon the world? In a humanitarian and political crisis, what kind of contribution is a play? These questions rise gradually to the surface in the British Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost . . . Hammad refracts her philosophical inquiry through an elegant assemblage of metatextual layers, filling her novel with plays within plays, works that comment directly on the uses of art." -- Jewish Currents
"Captivating . . . A deeply moving narrative that illuminates the lived realities of Palestinians in the West Bank, skillfully interweaving themes of resilience, the struggle for self-discovery, and the complex performance of identity in everyday life." -- Harper's Bazaar
Praise for The Parisian
"Hammad uses the features of historical novels to cut through the familiar dichotomies of West and Near East, placing her protagonist in a rich web of families, political intrigues, and cultural exchanges, and subtly reconfiguring the literary tropes of 'home' and 'abroad.'" -- New Yorker
"Dazzling . . . A deeply imagined historical novel with none of the usual cobwebs of the genre... The Parisian has an up-close immediacy and stylistic panache... that are all the more impressive coming from a London-born writer still in her 20s... Exquisite."--New York Times Book Review
"Assured and captivating . . . Ms. Hammad's acute evocation of place and personality ensures that we are never lost... This agile writer sets us firmly in place, fixing our attention on intersecting lives."--Wall Street Journal
"Reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, 27-year-old Isabella Hammad's epic debut novel surpasses both in its scope."--New York
"Stunning . . . a lush rendering of Palestinian life a century ago under the British mandate and a sumptuous epic about the enduring nature of love."--Vogue
