Skip to main navigation Skip to main content

Graywolf Press is proud to announce a series of events throughout 2024 celebrating fifty years of adventurous publishing, featuring debut and longstanding authors and taking place in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, and Tucson. More here

Book Title

A House at the Edge of Tears

Author 1
Vénus Khoury-Ghata; Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
Body
The thought of killing him never crossed my mind. I want to bury him alive.

In the city of Beirut, five shabby dwellings circle a courtyard with a pomegranate tree weeping blood red fruit. The residents hear screams in the night as a boy is tossed out into the street by his father—a punishment for masturbating in his sleep. A crime not worthy of the punishment: the neighbors gossip and decide that he must have tried to rape his sisters. “Small-boned with long, silky lashes, no one but the devil could camouflage evil so seductively.” The poems he writes are perhaps an even greater crime to his father, but ultimately a gift to his eldest sister, who narrates their story with a combination of brutal truth and stunning prose. As her brother becomes more and more lost to his family and to himself, we also learn of a Contessa who teaches tango, a family who spends every Sunday in search of buried treasure, and the miracle of a weeping Madonna statue that cries when human tears run dry.

In this harrowing and mesmerizing novel, celebrated novelist and poet, Khoury-Ghata, presents the disintegration of a family and a country—both ruled by a fury fueled by fear.

Share Title

List Price
$12.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-434-3
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
128
Trim Size
Trim Size
5 1/4 x 8 1/2
Keynote
A harrowing, poetic, and autobiographic account of growing up with a tyrannical father in a war-torn coutnry.

About the Author

Venus  Khoury-Ghata
Credit: Anne Selders
Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese poet and novelist, the author of the poetry collections Nettles and She Says, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the novel A House at the Edge of Tears. She has been a resident of France since 1973.

 
More by author
Marilyn  Hacker
Credit: Margaretta K. Mitchell
Marilyn Hacker is a National Book Award-winning poet and the translator from French of several contemporary poets, including Vénus Khoury-Ghata. She lives in Paris and New York, where she is a professor of English and Creative Writing at City College. She also teaches Literary Translation at the CUNY Graduate Center.
 
More by author

Praise

  • “In this small, poetic novel resides the fury, despair, shame, and love of a book ten times its size.”—Library Journal
  • “[Khoury-Ghata] untangles her brother’s story…Words roll like pebbles in a river as sentences open like umbrellas.”—Beirut Daily Star
  • "A spellbinding tale of exquisite prose."—Sanford Herald
Back to Table of Contents