A new subscription service will deliver books on Palestine to your door.
The Palestine Festival of Literature has launched a curated subscription service, the PalFest Bookshelf, which will deliver the best new books on Palestine, along with bespoke extras, straight to your door each month.
Subscribers will receive six key books a year. Most will be new titles, and some will be “older works of enduring relevance.” Each book will arrive with a special extra chosen by the author—a bookmark, a pamphlet, an artwork postcard. Subscribers will also be invited to Zoom discussions with authors and book club conversations with fellow readers.
In a moment of increased censorship of Palestinian voices, supporting new publishing on Palestine has never been more important, and the PalFest Bookshelf looks like an enlivening way to do just that.
Isabella Hammad (Enter Ghost) has called the new initiative, “an invaluable resource to guide our thinking and to connect us to one another,” while Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Message) has said that it “continues [PalFest’s] mission of marrying the great power of literature with the great fight of our time: the eradication of apartheid in general, and the freedom of Palestinians in particular.”
The first title on the PalFest Bookshelf is Palestinian writer, poet, journalist, and activist Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, “an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation,” which was released by Haymarket earlier this week. (While you wait for your copy to arrive, you can read this review of the book as well as this interview with El-Kurd.)
