Join Invisible Publishing and Librairie D+Q to launch BEIRUT with author Barrack Zailaa Rima! The author will appear in conversation with Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, author of The Good Arabs and knot body.
Read more about and buy the book here: https://shorturl.at/J8alR
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BEIRUT is Barrack Zailaa Rima’s celebrated graphic novel trilogy, gathered together and available in English for the first time.
Beirut is an intimate and poetic look at a beloved city that is at once autobiographical, documentary, and fantastic in nature. In Rima’s hands, Beirut is a labyrinth of alleyways and stories, a theater teeming with revolts, and a cenotaph to buried memories. With Rima and her family serving as our guides, and through chance encounters with incongruous figures (a librarian, a garbage collector—or the city’s last storyteller), we discover a city that longs for its Golden Age even as it is transformed by neoliberal forces in the aftermath of the Civil War—an evolution whose future remains uncertain.
Dreamlike, tender, and ever-attentive to the beauty of the line, Beirut offers a glimpse into Lebanon’s past and present, which must be pieced together to form a whole. From the promise of the political activism of its youth in the 1950s and 1960s, to the grating difficulties of the 2015 garbage crisis and the struggle to accommodate and assimilate Palestinian refugees, this is a journey through a city, and an expedition into the idea of home, that only Rima could shepherd. No matter the detours.
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A graphic novelist and filmmaker, BARRACK ZAILAA RIMA was born in 1972 in Tripoli, Lebanon, and has lived in Brussels for more than thirty years. While she explored a wide variety of media and art forms in her early career, Barrack now devotes herself to comics.
A former member of the Beirut-based Samandal collective, she is the author of several graphic novels, editorial cartoons, and compelling works of comics journalismincluding Le conteur du Caire, Beyrouth, and Sociologia . Her latest graphic novel, Dans le taxi, published by Alifbata Editions, received the prestigious Mahmoud Kahil Award for the best graphic novel from the MENA region (Lebanon, 2022) and the Grenades Literary Prize (Belgium, 2022).
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Espace Drawn & Quarterly Accessibility information:
– Our event space uses StopGap.ca ramps in an effort to encourage accessibility. Both the step at the entrance, followed by a half step and a door have StopGap ramps. The door opens inward and is not automated. Once inside, there are no additional steps.
– There is one non-gendered bathroom.
– It is not a sober space, our events sometimes offer alcohol.
♥️ Please email events@drawnandquarterly.com if you have any accessibility needs we can accommodate (for example, saving you a seat if you have mobility needs) for you to be able to enjoy our events, worry-free, and feel free to contact us for any concerns you may have ♥️

Librairie Drawn & Quarterly would like to acknowledge that our events and bookstores are located on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka. Many of us refer to Montreal as our home, but it is named Tiohtiá:ke. It has always been a gathering place for many First Nations and continues to be home to a diverse population of Indigenous peoples. We are grateful that creating and sharing stories has been a part of this land for thousands of years.