Review
Plucked from the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts by Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press, and published in the US by Steerforth Press,
De Niro's
Game was a finalist for the 2006 Giller Prize and the
Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the winner of the
Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and McAusland First
Book Prize.
Ten thousand bombs had landed on
Beirut, that crowded city, and I was lying on a blue sofa
covered with white sheets to protect it from dust and dirty
feet.
De Niro's Game started as a short story
based on an incident Hage remembers as a child growing up in
Beirut, when he witnessed other children playing Russian
roulette with real guns after watching The Deer Hunter.
His short story grew into a...
Beyond the Book
A Short History of Lebanon
The area now known as Lebanon (map)
was settled by the seafaring Phoenicians
(also known as Caananites) around 3,500
BCE. They established city states
such as Beirut, Tyre and Sidon. Over the
next five millennia the area would come
under the control of numerous empires
including the Persian, Greek, Roman,
Byzantine, Arab, Crusader and Ottoman
Empires. Throughout this period the
area, like much of the Middle East, was
not a defined country.
Following World War I and the collapse
of the Ottoman Empire, the Allied
nations carved up the...
