Books like Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive

'Vital' OMAR EL-AKKAD
'Superb' RAJA SHEHADEH
'Poignant' YANIS VAROUFAKIS

If you're not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you're culpable in them.

Activist and Middle East scholar Assal Rad is known online as the 'headline fixer' - with a special focus on exposing double standards in Western media, especially about Palestine. Israelis are described as 'children' and 'civilians', while Palestinians are 'people under 18' and 'collateral damage'; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine.

This pattern of dehumanizing language, Don't Say Palestine reveals, has been… show more.

The stories in Astrid, Aghast are by turns funny, poignant, magical, and humane. Two public-library workers fall in love with each other’s foibles while stuck in an elevator. A young boy stumbles upon a bucket of eels that stirs up family memories he’d rather forget. A solitary entomologist tries to make sense of a life filled with pianos and beetles. Ian Roy takes us on journeys through a world that is like our own, but not quite: a taxi driver falls in love with his car-jacker; an old man claims he can fly―and can, or almost.

This remarkable collection is… show more.