Is This How You Eat a Watermelon?

A dozen boarding school students find themselves stranded at the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. A young man, a young woman, and a mistreated monkey unite in a bid to survive. Even Israel's war on Lebanon cannot stop an old woman from getting her fix of nicotine. A young Lebanese student on a visit to Bahrain is wrongly implicated as a terrorist and placed in a prison with other political prisoners where light and hope is absconding. Fresh snow compels a sacrilegious undertaking from a father much to the shock of his children. Shared trauma takes the shape of phantom spectrals. And in the titular story, a hedonistic man eats himself to an early death with the desecration of the city of Beirut forming the backdrop.

Is This How You Eat a Watermelon? by Zein El-Amine invites readers into a world where love, war, and trauma collide with the desire to consume life--or be consumed by it.