Chris Merrill recommends these books from the Middle East

President Obama met this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and will soon meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Seems like a good opportunity to check in with our book critic, Christopher Merrill and ask him to select books about the region to highlight for us.

Here is what Chris has chosen for you:

The Amos Oz Reader
by Amos Oz, selected and edited by Mitza Ben-Dov

These selections from fifteen books by Israel’s acclaimed novelist and political commentator present a vivid portrait of the land at the heart of so much conflict — and of a writer determined to understand his life and his countrymen. Divided into four sections (The Kibbutz, Jerusalem, The Promised Land, and In an Autobiographical Vein), this reader offers a good introduction to the work of a man caught up in what he calls “a clash between right and right—the Palestinians are in Palestine because they have no other place in the world. The Israeli Jews are in Israel for the same reason—they have no other place in the world. This provides for a perfect understanding and a terrible tragedy.” Oz is an expert chronicler of that tragedy.

Rhyming Life & Death
by Amos Oz, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Oz’s new novel, a brief and witty exploration of the sources of creativity, details eight hours in the life of a famous writer — hours that seem on the surface to offer little in the way of drama. There is a stop at a coffee shop, followed by a reading and book signing at a cultural center, and then there is an encounter with an actress, which may or may not end in bed. But at each turn in the narrative the Author cannot help but invent stories about the people that he encounters — stories that shed light on the ways in which writers seek to make sense out of their experiences, their dreams and desires, their hopes and fears. Everyman, in short.

What are your favorite books about the Middle East?

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century
by Adina Hoffman
Publisher: Yale University Press

The first major biography of a Palestinian writer is an essay in reconstruction — of a Palestinian village and a way of life that disappeared with the creation of Israel in 1948: a tragedy that led a self-taught poet with a knack for business to create a body of work acclaimed the world over. Taha Muhammad Ali, who runs a souvenir shop by the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, is one of the most compelling literary figures of our time — a humble man who tells all the truth aslant, as an American poet once wrote. And what the American writer Adina Hoffman tells, in a book teeming with anecdotes and rich details gleaned from extensive interviews and research in Arab, English, and Hebrew archives, is a true story for the ages. “And so I came to the place itself,” Taha writes, “but the place is not/ its dust and stones and open space…” Indeed it is what the poet discovers, celebrates, and preserves in lines that will endure.