A Retired Gentleman

After a lifetime working as a professor of Arabic literature and a translator of contemporary Arab authors into English, the author now regales his readers with a rich medley of tales that will continue to resonate long after the book is put down.

His characters are mainly migrants to Canada and the USA from Palestine Lebanon and Syria, starting their lives again, dealing with their memories, with pasts that cannot be recalled, with exile, with just being immigrants.

The stories question how they have lived their lives. How did they settle into a new life? What happened to all the old relationships? How did they go about making new ones? Was it possible still to love? To fall in love again? Did they find happiness in their new country?

Issa J. Boullata is a Palestinian author, literary critic and translator, born in Jerusalem. He is formerly Professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He has written numerous non-fiction literary works, including Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (1990), A Window on Modernism: Studies in the Works of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Rocks and a Wisp of Soil (2005) in Arabic.

He has one novel in Arabic, A'id ila al-Quds (1998). His translations include Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's memoirs Princesses' Street (2005) and The First Well (1995), Mohamed Berrada's The Game of Forgetting (1986), Emily Nasrallah's Flight Against Time (1997), and Ghada Samman's The Square Moon (1998).