Y Knots

If, as Sabbagh writes, writing is always a performance and projection of a self, then Y Knots is the performance of a self breath-takingly prodigious and heterodox. That Sabbagh is able to weave this self into characters whose tussles leap off the page so compellingly shows a master at work. — Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida;Y Knots hold the Hanging Gardens of Babylon teleported into the tired aridity of a postmodern mind. The lushness of Sabbagh’s characters and settings is nurtured with such loving drip-irrigation precision that you'll find yourself enamored with both his beauties and his beasts. — Svetlana Lavochkina, novelist, poet, translator;Intelligent and passionate, these stories are singularities that make all the difference. Sabbagh seems to be, as he describes one of his characters, ‘an inexorably-thinking man’, but there is a certain rawness and playfulness to the stories which makes the philosophical grounding often quite hilarious. Sabbagh is also a unique chronicler of the Middle East and globalization. — Adnan Mahmutovic, author of At the Feet of Mothers