Available again, Arabesques is a classic, complex novel of identity, memory, and history in the Middle East and points beyond—including Iowa and New York City. Anton Shammas, the first Arab to write a novel in Hebrew, has given us a riveting look at a people we hear too little about: Palestinian Christians. Arabesques was chosen as one of the best books of 1988 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.

Anton Shammas is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

"This book is a history of its author's youth and the memoir of a family and a fabled region—Galilee. . . . A beautifully impressive piece of prose."—William H. Gass, New York Times Book Review

"Arabesques really brings, as novels were once supposed to bring, 'news' from elsewhere. . . . This book has already added something notable to Israeli literature."—Irving Howe, New York Review of Books

"If Hebrew literature is at all destined to have its Conrads, Nabokovs, Becketts and Ionescos, it could not have hoped for a more auspicious beginning."—Muhammed Siddiq, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Intricately conceived and beautifully written. . . . A crisp, luminous, and nervy mixture of fantasy and autobiography. . . [and] an elegant example of postmodern baroque."—John Updike, The New Yorker

"Arabesques is a classic of the exploration of identity. . . . A Palestinian master of Hebrew, living at the seam between Jews and Arabs, between the ancient and the modern, between loyalties and appetites, Shammas has written beautifully about his search for design. He transforms fact into fantasy without changing a thing."—Leon Wieseltier