The Penguin's Song

Galleys available upon request Print campaign: LA Times, NY Times, Harper's, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Believer, Bomb, Bookforum, In These Times, Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, SF Chronicle, Guardian UK, Toronto Globe & Mail, Miami Herald, Poets & Writers, NY Review of Books, New Yorker, Rain Taxi, Bloomsbury Review, , Wall St Journal, Washington Post, World Literature Today, among other publications focused on world literature, contemporary fiction, and Middle East politics. We'll send to the trades: PW, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist. Pursue Excerpts and/or Reviews in: Literary translation journals such as: eXchanges Journal of Literary Translation (University of Iowa), TWO LINES, Metamorphoses (Smith College), Circumference (Columbia University), Conjunctions (Bard College), Massachusetts Review, Banipal, and others. Online/social media campaign: Words Without Borders, Conversational Reading, Three Percent (University of Rochester), The Rumpus, World Literature Today, Bookslut, Salonica World Lit, Complete Review, Molussus, Awl, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Wikipedia Radio: PRI's "The World" Endorsements: Seeking from Elias Khoury, Sinan Antoon, Juan Goytisolo, Rabih Alameddine, Roger Allen, Max Weiss, Michelle Hartman

A family in exile from their home in old Beirut contends with claustrophobic conditions, recriminations, and unrealizable dreams of return."I loved this book when I read it in Arabic. The Penguin's Song is a classic novel of the Lebanese civil war."--Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman "Sixteen years after appearing in Daoud's native Lebanon, this elegiac novel has finally arrived in English ...Daoud's novel seems to have inherted its sensibilities--its recursive and dense sentences, its damaged narrator, its poignant obsession with lost time--from Remembrance of Things Past or Notes From the Underground...This is a novel about the trap of poverty--but also an affirmation of the Underground Man's noted maxim: 'I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness.'"--Paul Toutonghi, The New York Times Book Review "In The Penguin's Song, a city falls, a father dies, two women walk the same road over and over, a boy with a broken body dreams of love. Like Agota Kristof's Notebook Trilogy, this spare yet lyrical parable tells us more about exile, loss and the wearing away of hope than most us want to know. I love this beautiful book."--Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances and The End of Youth "Daoud's novel is an elegiac account of loneliness and separation...This is a haunting story inhabited by the ghosts of past lives and demolished buildings, where desires are left unfulfilled and loneliness sweeps through every soul. "--Publishers Weekly "Daoud's claustrophobic novel hauntingly conveys one family's isolation after being relocated during the Lebanese civil war...Daoud's evocation of history as it is experienced is excellent. His characters live through momentous events, but their struggles to survive land them in a kind of purgatory. A novel that defies expectations as it summons up the displacement and dehumanization that can come with war."--Kirkus Reviews " ...deftly explores how people cope with the aftermath of war and the tremendous struggle of rebuilding not only with bricks and concrete but with heart, hopes, and dreams."--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH, and Library Journal "Hassan Daoud is one of Lebanon's most important living writers. With her usual empathy and elegance, veteran translator Marilyn Booth brings out the idiosyncrasies and pathetic charm of this unlikely protagonist in his suffocating world. This is a heartbreaking novel...