We met with Samar Haddad, the woman at the helm of the historic Dar Atlas publishing house in Damascus. Since the 1950s, Dar Atlas has published, among other things, what Haddad describes as “beautiful books” both inside and out. “The true publisher, whether small, medium or large, is the freedom fighter of our age. As a publisher, I’m a resistance fighter in this age of consumerism.”
“I’m telling just one story, but from many different angles and directions as I’m trying to think about what it means to be Arab American. What is it like to inhabit that identity?”
Over the course of a year in the 1970s, a group of Syrian leftist poets and short story writers gathered to publish an underground literary zine, clandestinely printing at university libraries and handing out copies to students and friends. The publication went unnamed and, at least for a little for a while, outside the radar of the mukhabarat. In the short period before its editors either faced arrest or were forced into hiding, “the pamphlet,” as it came to be known, made waves through Syria’s literary scene.
For nearly a century, a bustling railway network connected people in Syria and Lebanon to the world and to one another. Amid violence and economic collapse on both sides of the border, can a few quixotic initiatives revive the lost trains?
Syria's Circassian minority divided, scattered by years of war | SyriaUntold syriauntold.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from syriauntold.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.