“Edwin Nasr has written a great war novel—sharp, intelligent, probing—that draws us into the exhausting venality of German Staatsräson and into a complex and evocative world of transnational solidarity and anti-colonial struggle centered in and around Lebanon and Palestine. What does it mean to fight and fail and start again? This is the crucial question Nasr’s book engages, a book for our historical moment, a book that needs to be read.”

—Avery F. Gordon, Professor Emerita University of California Santa Barbara and author of The Hawthorn Archive (2017) and Ghostly Matters (1997/2008)

“There is a boiling crisis ensnaring post–October 7 Berlin, and Ali, an embittered queen and disgruntled comrade, finds himself at the middle of it, despite his many attempts to evade the question it demands of everyone: What is to be done? Fear Eats Ali is a febrile and slick-witted immersion into the impossibility of evasion in the face of a genocide and its parallel reality as a culture of violent repression in Berlin. A besmirched and oft-quixotic Ali traces his family histories, Berghain social dynamics, revolutionary historical excavations from his beloved Lebanon, and many many sexual trysts for answers and distractions that force him back to the search for answers. Nasr’s prose is both indignant and charming, unforgiving in its surfacing of the paradoxes of our reality in which political agency is wrested from us at every turn. Prescient, razor-sharp, and radiant.”

—Juliana Huxtable, author of Mucus in My Pineal Gland (2017)

“Edwin Nasr gifts us staggeringly beautiful language that refuses to concede this moment and this world to the pragmatists or the fascists. You will not simply want to cite every paragraph of this book: You will leave rambling voice notes about it to comrades; you will gift it; you will read it out loud in bed to whomever, long after midnight.”

—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of a Fox, 2018