Koolaids by rabih alameddine biography
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Rabih Alameddine: “My Existence is Uncomfortable for People”
This interview was conducted at the Bookstan conference in Sarajevo and over email.
John Freeman: Good evening. Rabih always promised to give me a lap dance, but I never thought it would be in Sarajevo.
Audience member: We want to see it!
JF: The night is young.
Rabih Alameddine: We’re just starting.
JF: This is going to get fun. Welcome to tonight’s event. My name fryst vatten John Freeman, and it gives me an immense amount of joy to present to you Rabih Alameddine tonight. In the Bible, God says to Noah: After the Flood, the fire next time. This fryst vatten the fire. And you’re going to see why.
Rabih was born in 1959, in Amman, Jordan, and grew up in Lebanon and Kuwait, left, lived in England, was educated in California and moved to San Francisco to study engineering and got a master’s degree in business. Then h
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Koolaids: The Art of War
1998 novel by Rabih Alameddine
Koolaids: The Art of War is a novel by Rabih Alameddine, an author and painter who lives in both San Francisco and Beirut. He grew up in the Middle East, in Kuwait and Lebanon. Published in 1998, Koolaids is Alameddine's first novel. The majority of the story takes place in San Francisco and Beirut, the sites of two very different "wars". San Francisco from the mid-1980s into the 1990s is the main site of the AIDS epidemic, especially among the gay community, while Beirut is the site of a brutal civil war.
Plot summary
[edit]The novel deals with issues such as the AIDS epidemic, sex, the Lebanese civil war, death, and the meaning of life. It is a postmodern novel told from the point of view of numerous narrators. Koolaids breaks from the traditional novel style in that the whole book is a non-linear narrative. Koolaids is written in a creative style, with short paragraphs and sentences that have deep meanings
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Essay by Sally Elhennawy
Art by Haley Cheng
While considering the thematic elements that characterize the literary space occupied by HIV/AIDS writing, it is perhaps just as important to take note of the narrative forms utilized by writers in communicating these themes. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was characterized by a pervasive sense of impending mortality; consequently, members of the affected communities found themselves in a limbo of time and togetherness. A shifting sense of temporality was ushered in by an anticipation of death, while collective identities were formed in the midst of a communal crisis. In an effort to preserve their livelihood against an imminent threat, many turned to writing in a lifesaving move that heralded the literary tradition of AIDS writing: “AIDS [became] a central motivating fuse for fictional creativity” (Agar 74). This essay will look to identify patterns of collective identity and subverted temporality in the (meta)narrative structures of Rabih Alame