Get our latest staff recommendations, award news and digital catalog links right to your inbox.
Published by Interlink Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
The final novel from one of Lebanon’s greatest writers and narrator of Lebanese life.
Poison in the Air, Jabbour Douaihy’s final novel, chronicles the decades of social, political, and economic turmoil leading up to and including the recent collapse of his beloved Lebanon after the horrific explosion that occurred at the Port of Beirut in 2020. Douaihy brings a multitude of bottled-up toxicity to the surface, as though he is writing his last letter to the world, or a suicide note for Lebanon, as he paints a picture of a society marching down a path to self-destruction.
A first-person narration by an unnamed male protagonist, his generation’s journey—like his country’s history—seems to echo that of the phoenix. While that mythical creature is continually reborn from its own ashes, ever resilient, we now see it once again plummeting back into the fire, but as if nearly defeated, “filled with the poison of disappointments.” (Elias Khoury, L’Orient Litteraire, 2021) As imagined by Douaihy, being cut off from others and absorbed in self-interest brings out humanity’s most lethal, destructive nature.
Poison in the Air might serve as a warning to us all about the dangers of isolation and polarization, about what happens when we “sentence ourselves” to listening only to our own voices. The novel’s bleak portrayal reflects how essential it is to break out of self-contained bubbles and, like the butterfly he depicts striving toward the light, reunite with the outside world and re-embrace others, in body and in spirit.
Poison in the Air, Jabbour Douaihy’s final novel, chronicles the decades of social, political, and economic turmoil leading up to and including the recent collapse of his beloved Lebanon after the horrific explosion that occurred at the Port of Beirut in 2020. Douaihy brings a multitude of bottled-up toxicity to the surface, as though he is writing his last letter to the world, or a suicide note for Lebanon, as he paints a picture of a society marching down a path to self-destruction.
A first-person narration by an unnamed male protagonist, his generation’s journey—like his country’s history—seems to echo that of the phoenix. While that mythical creature is continually reborn from its own ashes, ever resilient, we now see it once again plummeting back into the fire, but as if nearly defeated, “filled with the poison of disappointments.” (Elias Khoury, L’Orient Litteraire, 2021) As imagined by Douaihy, being cut off from others and absorbed in self-interest brings out humanity’s most lethal, destructive nature.
Poison in the Air might serve as a warning to us all about the dangers of isolation and polarization, about what happens when we “sentence ourselves” to listening only to our own voices. The novel’s bleak portrayal reflects how essential it is to break out of self-contained bubbles and, like the butterfly he depicts striving toward the light, reunite with the outside world and re-embrace others, in body and in spirit.
Product Details
- Publisher: Interlink Books (January 30, 2024)
- Length: 192 pages
- ISBN13: 9781623717544
Browse Related Books
Raves and Reviews
“The air of this novel is filled with the poison of disappointments, and these are the disappointments of a Lebanese generation that searched for meaning and did not find it.”
– —Elias Khoury, L’Orient Litteraire
“Douaihy wrote several novels throughout his life, and though he never intended this role, critics and friends regarded him as the narrator of Lebanese life. He wrote about aspects of Lebanese life that history books could only dream of capturing, detailing Lebanon throughout its various historical moments to its current state of dystopian ruin and collapse, a world seen vividly in his last novel, Poison in the Air.”
– —Elie Chalala, Al Jadid
“Douaihy illuminates Lebanon’s tumultuous recent history in brief … readers will be both enlightened and charmed.”
– —Publishers Weekly on Printed in Beirut
“Douaihy’s masterpiece … A powerful portrait of identity and division in Lebanon.”
– —The New Arab on June Rain
“This novel is Douaihy’s most accomplished, subtle, and captivating.”
– —Livres Hebdo on The American Quarter
"As Lebanon descends into civil war, a romantic young man turns into a monster. Displaced from his hometown, our unnamed protagonist turns to books and bouts of moody introspection. Drawn to the aesthetics of revolution, he pens pithy slogans and briefly runs away to Jordan to join a pro-Palestinian militia. Back in Beirut, he teaches high school and tries to write, but his energies are mostly devoted to women, whom he seduces by complaining about the disappointments of life and the “burden of his fantasies.” Eventually he settles down with a philosophy student, whom he attacks with a cane when she ruins a diorama of his hometown. Released from jail, he shoots at passing cars with a sniper rifle. Meanwhile, confrontations between Sunnis and Shiites escalate, and Beirut crumbles. Twisting a likably naive protagonist into a malevolent beast, Douaihy (The King of India, 2022) invites readers to contemplate the losses and cruelties of a collapsing Lebanese society. The author’s final novel, completed just before his death in 2021, closes his oeuvre on a dissonant, mournful note."
“Death … It is the way in which he dances around it, approaches it, moves away from it, revels in it, that is mesmerizing … A masterpiece.”
– — Transfuge
“Magnificent yet pessimistic … clear, economical, and restrained writing.”
– — Le Monde
“A novel of petrifying acuity … A masterpiece.”
– — Le Journal du Dimanche
“There is no doubt that in imagining his character, so disconcerting, so unsettling, so definitively amoral, Jabbour Douaihy thought of Meursault, whom Albert Camus made his ‘Stranger’”
– — Le Telegramme
“Sensitive … Tribute to the cultural richness of a region ravaged by war.”
– — Politis
"Dark and elegiac beauty."
– — Le Courier de l'Atlas
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
- Book Cover Image (jpg): Poison in the Air Trade Paperback 9781623717544
