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.
This book holds 3 of Ghassan鈥檚 unfinished stories. Not my favourite Arabic text . Very heavy, complicated, and confusing once changed from 1st person to 3rd person. . Each on its own is a regular story, not the best of his works if you ask me. But then again, each one is a mystery! He stops typing in the middle of the climax. We don鈥檛 know happens. And this adds to the splendor and mystery of these three short stories. The fact that he did not complete them when the reader really would have wanted an answer made the reading experience a bit traumatizing actually.