"[A] masterly new book . . . Novelists like Khalifa are so critical in these times. They give us a story, and stories are specific . . . With Death Is Hard Work, Khaled Khalifa has, intentionally or not, also laid claim to [Faulkner's mantle]." --Elliot Ackerman, The New York Times Book Review
"Searing . . . Khalifa is a soulful and perfectly unsentimental writer . . . Leri Price [. . .] is alive and faithful to the Syrian's unadorned and direct prose, sentences that often bring together the poetic and the horrific . . . Robust in its doubts, humane in its gaze, and gentle in its persistence." --Hisham Matar, The Guardian
"[A] brilliant, blackly absurdist road-trip novel, a restaging of As I Lay Dying in the thick of the world's most brutal civil war." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Astonishing . . . The journey recalls Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the long last ride of Addie Bundren; like Faulkner too, Khalifa employs a shifting array of voices and reflections, moving from perspective to perspective, present to past and back again. The effect is a persistent deepening, as stories are introduced and then revisited, details added through the play of memory . . . The power of the novel--of all Khalifa's novels--is that it unfolds within a human context, which pushes against and resists the prevailing social one." --David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"Refusing to look away from its characters' challenges, the novel is clear-eyed in its presentation of living in a war zone. Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Syrian author Khalifa reaches readers with a style that is straightforward, true, and profound." --Emily Dziuban, Booklist (starred review)
"Khalifa's novel compellingly tackles the strain of responsibility felt by a man in war-torn Syria . . . serves as a reminder of the devastation of war and the power of integrity." --Publishers Weekly
"Insistent, memorable portrait of the small indignities and large horrors of the civil war in Syria . . . Suggestive at times of a modern Decameron and a skillfully constructed epic that packs a tremendous amount of hard-won knowledge into its pages." --Kirkus (starred review)
"Wryly compelling...Death Is Hard Work may be Khalifa's finest achievement yet, movingly conveying the fear, paranoia and hardships of life in an embattled police state." --The Financial Times
"If literature is a momentary stay against confusion, then Khalifa's novels are ardent stays against destruction and decay--and Death Is Hard Work continues this tradition." --Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"Death is Hard Work moves in a way similar to the war it chronicles--mercilessly over the bones of its victims . . . The result is something at the intersection of Faulkner and Kafka, a modern-day As I Lay Dying passed through the lens of maddening bureaucracy, hypocrisy and slaughter." --Omar El Akkad, BookPage
