All That's Left to You: A Novella and Other Stories

Ghassan Kanafani is a tragic figure,from the prose he completed before his assassination in 1972 we can see so much skill and talent,his vocab,expression and style is accessible and well constructed. Like Mahfouz his world is familiar in places but he doesn't complicate it, the Palestinian locality isn't a smothering one, in fact so little of his stories are in Palestine,his characters are those of the diaspora. The best story here is the title story,a superb and tense novella,full of mundane realities but the shadow of the very real occupation is everywhere,the desert seems like an agent of Israel in places. The impact of these 55 pages was truly like a scythe cutting through an indolent mind,this novella grabs you and pulls you in.One or two of these stories are formulaic but the majority are original enough to make you wish that Kanafani was still with us now , a 72 yr old elder statesman of arab literature, taking up the mantle from the great Mahfouz,so recently departed.Well worth reading,superb.

Wonderful introduction by Roger Allen, and excellent selection of Kanafani’s shorter works.

Received an old copy. Not just old but dirty as well.

I am very familiar and have read the novel and the short stories in its native language (Arabic), so I can judge the quality of the translation and I say it is excellent. The ideas are relayed fully in a very strong expressions and delicate choosing of vocabularies.The stories are a MUST READ to anyone who likes to get a glance of the events in the middle east in the middle of last century, not from a historical stand point, but more from a social stand point. It also touches on some of the reality that the Palestinian refugees (and possibly can generalize to all refugees of wars and violence) went through.