The last major work completed by Samir Kassir before his tragic death in 2005, Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. Generously illustrated and eloquently written, Beirut illuminates contemporary issues of modernity and democracy while at the same time memorably recreating the atmosphere of one of the world's most picturesque, dynamic, and resilient cities.

    Transit Beirut is an anthology of complex urban experience that brings together memoir, short stories, journalism, photography and animation. The view is wide: from fiction to documentary and everything in between. Beirut is undergoing an energetic process of rediscovery and reinvention by its own inhabitants, many of whom are only now returning to the city.With new and established Arab writers together for the first time, Transit Beirut oscillates between sarcastic humour and serious exploration of the tensions and conflicts in a society undergoing reconstruction. Things are never what they seem. In Transit Beirut, students express themselves in the language of military conquest and athletes train to ‘defeat’ cholesterol; T.E. Lawrence, Orientalism and a PLO grandmother’s revolutionary milk interlace, and a pine forest becomes a graveyard.Malu Halasa has been published by the Guardian, Financial Times and Times, in London. For four years, she was the features editor of Tank magazine. She is the managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library in the Netherlands.Roseanne Khalaf is an Assistant Professor of English and coordinator of Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut. Her publications include: Once Upon a Time in Lebanon, and Lebanon: Four Journeys to the Past. She was the co-editor of Themes, a twelfth-grade English Textbook for the National Centre for Educational Research and Development, in Beirut.

    Fossils are cluses to our planet's mysterious past. This book is filled with facts and photographs.