Khaled Khalifa, writer

A book for my 'to find and to read' list found in the Saturday Profile of the New York Times.

A bearish man with a boiling corona of steel-gray hair, Mr. Khalifa, 44, has a clownish humor that undercuts his large literary ambitions. He smoked, drank and plowed through a table full of appetizers during a late-night interview at Ninar, a Damascus restaurant popular with Syrian artists and intellectuals, his long answers interrupted by bursts of raucous laughter.

... “The main thing I wanted to get at was the struggle of two fundamentalisms,” he said. “I remember that heaviness, that feeling of death dominating the whole city. You were always surrounded by armed men who agreed on only one thing: If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

... “In Praise of Hatred” is narrated by a young woman, and its title comes from an observation she makes about the way hatred filters from the violent streets outside into her own quiet life: “Hatred possessed me. I was excited by it, I felt it was saving me; it gave me a sense of superiority I had been seeking for a long time.”