Janus City (the Many Faces Of Beirut)

A city where myth and catastrophe have become impossible to separate.

Janus City is a lyrical sketch interweaving a personal, political, and mythological history of Beirut, a place as much of beguiling legend as it is of political disaster. Said to have been destroyed and rebuilt no fewer than seven times, Beirut has endured a fifteen-year civil war, a restless peace, a catastrophic economic collapse, one of the world''s largest non-nuclear explosions, and, most recently, successive wars. Each calamity makes more porous the border between myth and reality, between the interior landscape of imagination and the exterior chaos of the ancient port city.

Part personal memoir and part excavation of political collapse, Janus City is ultimately a tribute to a beloved, complicated city, and an attempt to understand what it means to make a home in a place balanced eternally on the rim of disaster.

“A seriously talented writer with an intelligence that cuts through mountains of bullshit. No one, and I mean no one, can write about Beirut better.” —Rabih Alameddine

“Janus City is a small masterwork. Lina Mounzer, one of the finest chroniclers of modern-day Lebanon working in the English language today, is a writer possessed of both enormous talent and emotional clarity, all of it on display in this raw, beautiful book.” —Omar El Akkad

“Disaster is a literature of its own. Janus City stays inside it, recording it, seeing that nothing is forgotten. Lina Mounzer has given us a master class in what it means to not simply walk away, to abide.” —Salar Abdoh

Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Freeman''s, The Baffler, and Equator, and in the anthologies Tales of Two Planets, The Best American Essays 2022, and Gaza: The Story of a Genocide. She is senior editor at literary arts and culture magazine The Markaz Review.

OR SHORTS is a series of short books publishing urgent writing at the intersection of politics, culture, and contemporary life. Combining elegant design with incisive, voice-driven writing, each SHORT offers a fresh perspective in a format that fits into modern reading lives.