Translated by Leri Price. The Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa’s novels have cruel titles, of the sort Jean Genet might have composed for William S. Burroughs, or Verlaine for Rimbaud. Khalifa, who was born near Aleppo in 1964, has published six novels in Arabic. He can also resemble Chaucer, for whom smell was indicative of a person’s moral state. This sense, so intimately linked to memory and desire, matters in fiction as it does in life.

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Persons: Khaled Khalifa, Leri Price, Khaled Khalifa’s, Jean Genet, William S, Burroughs, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Khalifa, ”, antic, Philip Roth, Dickens, Chaucer Locations: Syrian, Aleppo, Syria