Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian journalist, fiction writer, and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Kanafani died at the age of 36, assassinated by car bomb in Beirut, By the Israeli Mossad
Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was born in Acre in Palestine (then under the British mandate) in 1936. His father was a lawyer, and sent Ghassan to a French missionary school in Jaffa. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Kanafani and his family fled to Lebanon, but soon moved on to Damascus, Syria, to live there as Palestinian refugees.
After studying Arabic literature at the University of Damascus, Kanafani became a teacher at the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria. There, he began writing short stories, influenced by his contact with young children and their experiences as stateless citizens. In 1960 he moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he became the editor of several newspapers, all with an Arab nationalist affiliation. In Beirut, he published the novel Men in the Sun (1962). He also published extensively on literature and politics, focusing on the the Palestinian liberation movement and the refugee experience, as well as engaging in scholarly literary criticism, publishing several books about post-1948 Palestinian and Israeli literature.
Kanafani is the most emotional writer I have ever come across. His descriptions are so vivid, and so empathy-evoking, that you cannot be unmoved reading it.
The narrative style of the title story is very experimental and at times slightly confusing, but never distracting from the story, and the voice of the desert adds an rare dimension to the tale. The other stories in the collection aren't as palestine-centric as Men in the Sun or The Land of Sad Oranges, but nevertheless transports you to the Middle-east that he knew, among the troubles and suffering of common men and women, and reflecting his compassion for their struggles.
I would recommend it to any fan of literature, particularly resistance or middle-eastern; your bookshelf is not complete without it.