RED WHITE & BLUES

06/21/2026

06/14/2026

Advance Praise for Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life:
"Samar Yazbek is a renowned Syrian journalist and novelist whose fearless reporting has earned her the PEN Pinter Prize and the French Best Foreign Book Award...Her latest work, Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, is a vital, harrowing document of survival in Gaza following October 2023. Through the testimonies of twenty-six Palestinians, Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged 13 to 65. The title is taken from the actual flyers dropped by the military before bombings, providing a human portrait of one of the most devastating military offensives in recent history."
—THE MIRROR

"Yazbek decided to document the personal stories of....survivors, giving a voice to the invisible and to those who lost so much of their physical selves. Documenting the terrifying inhumanity and depth of suffering also takes a severe personal toll on those doing the documenting."
—ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

"Yazbek is no stranger to war journalism. While known primarily as a novelist, she has dedicated much of the last decade to documenting atrocities, particularly in her home country, before any archival dust settled on them...While narrating death and destruction, the witnesses Yazbek spoke with still found a way to illustrate that, in the words of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, they taught life. Many insisted on showing Yazbek pictures of their families and of themselves when their bodies were still whole; some entrusted her with a list of names of the people they lost; they defied erasure by every means available to them...Yazbek’s collection of testimonies, spanning the shattered lives of children as young as thirteen to the weary wisdom of the elderly, refutes the diminishment intended by the airdropped leaflets. If the leaflets claim their presence is a danger, Yazbek proves their erasure is the true catastrophe."
—ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

"In her latest work, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices From Gaza, Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek collects the testimonies of 26 Gazans who describe their accounts of genocide...Yazbek hopes that this book of testimonials “will be a cry against the brutal barbarity that the Palestinians are enduring,” pulling together people across age, gender, and geography to present a complete as possible picture of the ongoing genocide. Together, the testimonies speak to a constant flux between life and death."
—THE SKINNY

"Adapted from the warning pamphlets dropped over Gaza moments before bombardments, Your Presence Is A Danger To Your Life is a harrowing yet vital account of life in Gaza after October 7. Compiled from the testimonies of 26 Palestinians living under the genocidal siege imposed by the Israeli Defence Force, Syrian writer and journalist Samar Yazbek captures the unimaginable realities faced by the men, women, and children of Gaza...This is not an easy book to read, but it is an essential one...One fine thread through this work is the persistence of hope, and therefore resistance. Miraculously, the testimonies leave little room for hatred: instead, they focus on mourning the dead, preserving memory, and finding the strength to overcome unimaginable brutality."
—BUZZ MAGAZINE

“These testimonies of the unconscionably injured are among hundreds of thousands such testimonies emerging from Gaza since October 7, 2023. Despite Israel’s genocidal drive to silence Palestinian voices, despite Western complicity in this silencing, these twenty-six testimonies—shared with Yazbek and translated by Price—now exist as pages. If, like me, you have the means and the capacity to read them in all their blistering detail, and if you too have no personal knowledge of the unspeakable zannanat that plague these pages, then you—we—have a particular duty: not only to read these precious words, but to act on them.”
—Natasha Soobramanien, coauthor (with Luke Williams) of Diego Garcia

“A work of profound ethical significance, a direct offering of words from voices that should never be silenced. Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life is almost too painful to read, but so deeply humane and important that it compels us not to look away.”
—Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

“This is a remarkable, shattering book that holds its voices with dignity and care. It speaks to us from a red world of absolute loss, yet is suffused with an extraordinary persistence of love. Beyond geopolitics, rhetoric, territory, and leaders, there remains the bare fact of broken lives and the unbearable weight of human love.”
—A. L. Kennedy, author of Alive in the Merciful Country

“Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, I have been grasping for words. Yazbek has done something extraordinary. She has captured the vocabulary we have all been searching for by turning to the people who witnessed this violence firsthand in Gaza. The book does not make heroes of genocide survivors, nor does it romanticize their struggle. Instead, we are invited to mourn with them, to marvel at their endurance, and to be sobered by humanity’s capacity for barbarism. Yazbek shows us what it means to bear witness, to make space for grief, pain, and suffering too vast to be contained, and how to do so with dignity, respect, and humility. She has once again modeled what it means to be a keeper of humanity’s memory.”
—Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction
Praise for Samar Yazbek:
“One of Syria’s most gifted novelists.”
—CNN

“Yazbek’s is the urgent task of showing the world what is happening. Thanks to her, we can read about the appalling things that go on in secret, underground places.”
—THE GUARDIAN
Additional Praise for Samar Yazbek (Where the Wind Calls Home):

***A 2024 National Book Award Finalist***
“The potent latest from Yazbek (Planet of Clay) weighs the consequences of the Syrian civil war after a 19-year-old soldier, Ali, survives his patrol station’s 2013 bombing in the Lattakia mountains. This slim novel packs a punch.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture.”
—ASYMPTOTE JOURNAL

“An evocative…meditation about people caught in the turning wheel of Syria’s violent present.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
Additional Praise for Samar Yazbek (Planet of Clay):

***A 2021 National Book Award Finalist***
“Planet of Clay gives a haunting and unflinching look at the horrors of war―the bombing, the starvation, the fear―all seen through the eyes of Rima, a young girl with a vibrant imagination.”
―NPR

“The young, mute narrator of this compassionate novel becomes a poignant emblem of the Syrian women confined by war…a bold portrayal of besieged people.”
―THE OBSERVER

“Wrenching…offers a remarkable account of wartime despair.”
―PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Karen: From Samar Yazbek, the acclaimed Syrian journalist and a 2024 and 2021 National Book Award finalist for Where the Wind Calls Home and Planet of Clay, comes a vital portrait of October 7, 2023, and its aftermath through the harrowing yet life-affirming accounts of 26 Palestinians. In her own words, her work “is a response to our collective indifference, and our ugly habituation to violence and brutality”. YOUR PRESENCE IS A DANGER TO YOUR LIFE: Survival and Witness in Gaza (Other Press Trade Paperback Original; On Sale: 8/18/26) challenges this indifference, showing not just the suffering of the Palestinian people but the power of their voices and their stories.

Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experience of October 7, 2023, and what their life has been like since that pivotal date. In YOUR PRESENCE IS A DANGER TO YOUR LIFE—a title adapted from one of the flyers dropped on the residents of Gaza minutes before a bombing—Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged 13 to 65, who have witnessed what history may remember as one of the most savage military offensives of our time.

Their stories reveal a nightmarish dystopia, where each survivor has endured unimaginable loss—homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated— many have been treated in hospitals ravaged by Israeli attacks. But these survivors remain determined to share their experiences, and cling to the hope that their voices will resonate.

More than a record of horrors for posterity, this breathtaking collection testifies to the power of education and writing, which remind us of our common humanity. It’s a heartbreaking exposure of the horrors of modern warfare and a stark reminder of the importance of Palestinian narratives. I hope to stay in touch with you about possibilities for it.

About the Author: Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist who has been a prominent advocate for human rights, and more specifically women’s rights, in Syria. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as one of the “39 most promising authors under the age of 40” by Beirut39, organized by the Hay Festival. In 2011, she took part in the popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. In 2012 she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize “International writer of courage” for her book In the Crossfire, and received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize the following year. In 2022, Yazbek was chosen by the Royal Society of Literature as one of twelve International Writers. Yazbek has published two short-story collections, seven novels, and four nonfiction literary narratives. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
About the Translator: Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024, 2021, and 2019. Her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

YOUR PRESENCE IS A DANGER TO YOUR LIFE: Survival and Witness in Gaza • By Samar Yazbek • Translated by Leri Price •
Other Press Trade Paperback Original • ISBN: 978-1-63542-612-0 • On-Sale Date: Aug 18, 2026 •
Price: $17.99

06/14/2026

Award-winning Palestinian War Reporter Rami Abou Jamous' THE STARS SHINE BRIGHTER (On Sale: September 2026)

Karen: I’m honored to bring you a work of defiant hope from an extraordinary individual and multiple-time Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award winner for war correspondence, Rami Abou Jamous. A Palestinian journalist and war reporter dispatching from the Gaza Strip, Rami currently acts as board chairman of Press House Palestine and the founder of GazaPress Network, which helps foreign journalists in Gaza and other parts of Palestine. Since the start of the war in Gaza in 2023, he has also been regularly reporting for French media, including France 24 and Radio France; intertwining politics with his personal experiences that have resulted from living through war, displacement, and siege. THE STARS SHINE BRIGHTER: The Story of a Father and His Son (Other Press Trade Paperback Original; On Sale: 9/8/26) was written amidst the daily churn of endless violence in the Gaza strip and depicts a father’s fight not only to keep his young son alive but to preserve his childhood as best as he can. Rami decides to create a bubble around this little boy that fear, anxiety, and sadness will not be able to pe*****te. Explosions are fireworks, drones are birds in full flight, and his 2-year-old son, Walid keeps smiling. Through a series of forced moves from Gaza City to Rafah to Deir al Balah, from a large, modern apartment to a refugee tent, Rami fights to preserve the safety and dignity of his family and neighbors. It is a Palestinian journalist’s extraordinary account of family, survival, and resilience in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, Rami Abou Jamous is already packed. A Francophone journalist from Palestine, he is familiar with conflicts and quickly grasps what the scale of the Israeli response will be. His emergency bag containing passports, clothes, medical supplies, and cash is never far away—Rami is the father of a 2-year-old son, Walid, whom he must protect at all costs, physically and psychologically.

Through the eyes of a father trying to protect his child, THE STARS SHINE BRIGHTER illuminates the civilian experience of war. There is constant fear, forced displacement, and the loss of basic security. Yet, there are also moments of tenderness, humor, and resilience that make survival possible. Presenting a voice that is honest, clear, and deeply human; rather than an ideological discussion, THE STARS SHINE BRIGHTER reminds of the precious sanctity of human life that hangs in the balance of the statistics and scale of war’s destruction. Illustrating what it is like to raise a child under bombardment, to explain the unexplainable, and to keep passing on values in a crumbling world, THE STARS SHINE BRIGHTER is direct and unflinching; at times, harrowing, yet sustains the dignity of its characters.

This declaration of a father’s love for his son, reminds that behind every war, there are lives, voices, and stories that refuse to be silenced. I hope to stay in touch with you about this unique and priceless testimony about the human capacity to persevere and preserve.

About the Author: Rami Abou Jamous is a journalist and three-time winner of the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents, which pays tribute to those who work in hazardous conditions to provide access to information.
About the Translator: Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than ninety books, including Marc Petitjean’s The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris and Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly and Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.

THE STARS SHINE BRIGHTER: The Story of a Father and His Son
By Rami Abou Jamous • Translated by Adriana Hunter •
Other Press Trade Paperback Original •
ISBN: 978-1-63542-585-7 • On-Sale Date: Sep 8, 2026 • Price: $16.99

06/11/2026

YOUR PRESENCE IS A DANGER TO YOUR LIFE: Survival and Witness in Gaza

By Samar Yazbek

Advance Praise for Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life:
"Samar Yazbek is a renowned Syrian journalist and novelist whose fearless reporting has earned her the PEN Pinter Prize and the French Best Foreign Book Award...Her latest work, Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, is a vital, harrowing document of survival in Gaza following October 2023. Through the testimonies of twenty-six Palestinians, Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged 13 to 65. The title is taken from the actual flyers dropped by the military before bombings, providing a human portrait of one of the most devastating military offensives in recent history."
—THE MIRROR

"Yazbek decided to document the personal stories of....survivors, giving a voice to the invisible and to those who lost so much of their physical selves. Documenting the terrifying inhumanity and depth of suffering also takes a severe personal toll on those doing the documenting."
—ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

"Yazbek is no stranger to war journalism. While known primarily as a novelist, she has dedicated much of the last decade to documenting atrocities, particularly in her home country, before any archival dust settled on them...While narrating death and destruction, the witnesses Yazbek spoke with still found a way to illustrate that, in the words of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, they taught life. Many insisted on showing Yazbek pictures of their families and of themselves when their bodies were still whole; some entrusted her with a list of names of the people they lost; they defied erasure by every means available to them...Yazbek’s collection of testimonies, spanning the shattered lives of children as young as thirteen to the weary wisdom of the elderly, refutes the diminishment intended by the airdropped leaflets. If the leaflets claim their presence is a danger, Yazbek proves their erasure is the true catastrophe."
—ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

"In her latest work, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices From Gaza, Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek collects the testimonies of 26 Gazans who describe their accounts of genocide...Yazbek hopes that this book of testimonials “will be a cry against the brutal barbarity that the Palestinians are enduring,” pulling together people across age, gender, and geography to present a complete as possible picture of the ongoing genocide. Together, the testimonies speak to a constant flux between life and death."
—THE SKINNY

"Adapted from the warning pamphlets dropped over Gaza moments before bombardments, Your Presence Is A Danger To Your Life is a harrowing yet vital account of life in Gaza after October 7. Compiled from the testimonies of 26 Palestinians living under the genocidal siege imposed by the Israeli Defence Force, Syrian writer and journalist Samar Yazbek captures the unimaginable realities faced by the men, women, and children of Gaza...This is not an easy book to read, but it is an essential one...One fine thread through this work is the persistence of hope, and therefore resistance. Miraculously, the testimonies leave little room for hatred: instead, they focus on mourning the dead, preserving memory, and finding the strength to overcome unimaginable brutality."
—BUZZ MAGAZINE

“These testimonies of the unconscionably injured are among hundreds of thousands such testimonies emerging from Gaza since October 7, 2023. Despite Israel’s genocidal drive to silence Palestinian voices, despite Western complicity in this silencing, these twenty-six testimonies—shared with Yazbek and translated by Price—now exist as pages. If, like me, you have the means and the capacity to read them in all their blistering detail, and if you too have no personal knowledge of the unspeakable zannanat that plague these pages, then you—we—have a particular duty: not only to read these precious words, but to act on them.”
—Natasha Soobramanien, coauthor (with Luke Williams) of Diego Garcia

“A work of profound ethical significance, a direct offering of words from voices that should never be silenced. Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life is almost too painful to read, but so deeply humane and important that it compels us not to look away.”
—Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

“This is a remarkable, shattering book that holds its voices with dignity and care. It speaks to us from a red world of absolute loss, yet is suffused with an extraordinary persistence of love. Beyond geopolitics, rhetoric, territory, and leaders, there remains the bare fact of broken lives and the unbearable weight of human love.”
—A. L. Kennedy, author of Alive in the Merciful Country

“Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, I have been grasping for words. Yazbek has done something extraordinary. She has captured the vocabulary we have all been searching for by turning to the people who witnessed this violence firsthand in Gaza. The book does not make heroes of genocide survivors, nor does it romanticize their struggle. Instead, we are invited to mourn with them, to marvel at their endurance, and to be sobered by humanity’s capacity for barbarism. Yazbek shows us what it means to bear witness, to make space for grief, pain, and suffering too vast to be contained, and how to do so with dignity, respect, and humility. She has once again modeled what it means to be a keeper of humanity’s memory.”
—Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction

Praise for Samar Yazbek:
“One of Syria’s most gifted novelists.”
—CNN

“Yazbek’s is the urgent task of showing the world what is happening. Thanks to her, we can read about the appalling things that go on in secret, underground places.”
—THE GUARDIAN

Additional Praise for Samar Yazbek (Where the Wind Calls Home):

***A 2024 National Book Award Finalist***
“The potent latest from Yazbek (Planet of Clay) weighs the consequences of the Syrian civil war after a 19-year-old soldier, Ali, survives his patrol station’s 2013 bombing in the Lattakia mountains. This slim novel packs a punch.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture.”
—ASYMPTOTE JOURNAL

“An evocative…meditation about people caught in the turning wheel of Syria’s violent present.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS

Additional Praise for Samar Yazbek (Planet of Clay):

***A 2021 National Book Award Finalist***
“Planet of Clay gives a haunting and unflinching look at the horrors of war―the bombing, the starvation, the fear―all seen through the eyes of Rima, a young girl with a vibrant imagination.”
―NPR

“The young, mute narrator of this compassionate novel becomes a poignant emblem of the Syrian women confined by war…a bold portrayal of besieged people.”
―THE OBSERVER
“Wrenching…offers a remarkable account of wartime despair.”
―PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Karen: From Samar Yazbek, the acclaimed Syrian journalist and a 2024 and 2021 National Book Award finalist for Where the Wind Calls Home and Planet of Clay, comes a vital portrait of October 7, 2023, and its aftermath through the harrowing yet life-affirming accounts of 26 Palestinians. In her own words, her work

“is a response to our collective indifference, and our ugly habituation to violence and brutality”. YOUR PRESENCE IS A DANGER TO YOUR LIFE: Survival and Witness in Gaza (Other Press Trade Paperback Original; On Sale: 8/18/26) challenges this indifference, showing not just the suffering of the Palestinian people but the power of their voices and their stories.

Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experience of October 7, 2023, and what their life has been like since that pivotal date. In YOUR PRESENCE IS A DANGER TO YOUR LIFE—a title adapted from one of the flyers dropped on the residents of Gaza minutes before a bombing—Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged 13 to 65, who have witnessed what history may remember as one of the most savage military offensives of our time.

Their stories reveal a nightmarish dystopia, where each survivor has endured unimaginable loss—homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated— many have been treated in hospitals ravaged by Israeli attacks. But these survivors remain determined to share their experiences, and cling to the hope that their voices will resonate.

More than a record of horrors for posterity, this breathtaking collection testifies to the power of education and writing, which remind us of our common humanity. It’s a heartbreaking exposure of the horrors of modern warfare and a stark reminder of the importance of Palestinian narratives. I hope to stay in touch with you about possibilities for it.

About the Author: Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist who has been a prominent advocate for human rights, and more specifically women’s rights, in Syria. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as one of the “39 most promising authors under the age of 40” by Beirut39, organized by the Hay Festival. In 2011, she took part in the popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. In 2012 she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize “International writer of courage” for her book In the Crossfire, and received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize the following year. In 2022, Yazbek was chosen by the Royal Society of Literature as one of twelve International Writers. Yazbek has published two short-story collections, seven novels, and four nonfiction literary narratives. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
About the Translator: Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024, 2021, and 2019. Her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

YOUR PRESENCE IS A DANGER TO YOUR LIFE: Survival and Witness in Gaza • By Samar Yazbek • Translated by Leri Price •
Other Press Trade Paperback Original • ISBN: 978-1-63542-612-0 • On-Sale Date: Aug 18, 2026 •
Price: $17.99