Though deeply personal at its core, Khamriyyat Hong Kong is an unsentimental, unapologetic, confessional, and confrontational collection with a gutsy impersonal touch and keen-eyed cultural politics. It sails comparatively--and seemingly drunkenly--across disciplines, literatures, religions, arts, and cultures, dissecting such unsettled concepts as belief, desire, sexuality, love, paradise, old age, creativity, war, and dogma. What emerges at the end of its journey is a collage of intertwining oppositions: reality and dream, eroticism and decorousness, logic and incoherence, rationality and absurdity, seriousness and playfulness. It is a poetic collection that does not allow the reader to relax as everything in it is more provocative than pacific.

Autorentext

Ahmed Elbeshlawy is a scholar of comparative literature, author, and poet. His books include Sahara (2023), Unappeasable Ghosts (2021), Savage Charm (2019), Twenty Five Meditations on Writing and Subjectivity (2019), Woman in Lars von Trier's Cinema (2016), America in Literature and Film (2011), and various articles and book chapters in different anthologies.