Every Moment Is a Life

susan abulhawa is a novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist. She was born to refugees of the Six-Day War of 1967, when her family’s land was seized and Israel captured what remained of Palestine. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, translated into thirty languages, has sold over a million copies worldwide and is considered a classic in Palestinian literature. Her other works include The Blue Between Sky and Water and Against the Loveless World, an Aspen Words Literary Prize and Atheneum Prize finalist and winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Palestine Book Award, along with, most recently, the short story collection she edited of writers from Gaza, Every Moment is a Life. abulhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s organization dedicated to uplifting Palestinian children.Huzama Hubayeb is a Palestinian novelist. She won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for her novel Velvet, which was translated into English and selected among the fifty most significant Arabic novels of the twenty-first century. She is also the author of The Root of Passion (2007) and Before the Queen Falls Asleep (2011), four short story collections, and two poetry collections.

"Beautiful."—Vogue Arabia "An incredibly powerful book. [Every Moment is a Life] will surely be a reference for generations to come."—Adam Horowitz, Mondoweiss "An astonishing anthology. Heartrending and indelible, this is a vital account of Palestinians’ horrific reality." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "A tour de force. The beautifully compiled book’s descriptions of the torturous nature of the routine during genocide is a particularly notable inclusion. Gaza, in these pages, is not only where people are being killed. It is where people are still naming babies, mending shoes, boiling coffee, missing rooms, loving the dead and writing. To produce these stories, revise them over broken connections, and live long enough to tell them was itself resistance. Not resistance as slogan, but as breath held against erasure. The reader is left with beauty that cannot absolve itself, and testimony that refuses to be reduced to pain alone." —Middle East Eye "Achingly rich with sensory details of a land being made increasingly and traumatically barren, this is not a project to make sense of brutality but to compel witness to it. An electrifying, if harrowing, anthology of Palestinian voices that will define a generation."—Kirkus "Abulhawa’s collection is what the American reader needs to read today to understand what the US government has enabled, and continues to enable, Israel to do in Gaza."—Imad Harb, Arab Center Washington DC