From the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of De Niro's Game and Beirut Hellfire Society, a riveting, cosmopolitan collection of stories set in places around the world.
In Montreal, a failed photographer's surprise encounter with Sophia Loren leads to a revelation about his dead mother. In Baghdad, a translator is held captive while facilitating work on a secret deal between Iraq and the United States. In Beirut, a disillusioned geologist eagerly awaits the impending destruction of a tsunami. And in Tokyo, in the mesmerizing title story of this collection, a young Palestinian graduate of an American university is shaken by news from the Persian Gulf.
Rawi Hage's Stray Dogs travels between states-both nation states and states of mind-to vividly explore the sometimes shocking ways our fragile modern identities are born, die, and live again in our fragmented, globalized world. Politically astute, philosophically wise, compassionate and observant, startlingly relevant and caustically funny, these stories reveal the unique vision of Rawi Hage at his very best.
RAWI HAGE was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese Civil War during the 1970s and 1980s. He immigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award. His third novel, Carnival, told from the perspective of a taxi driver, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Award and won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. And his most recent novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into thirty languages.
