October 2026
Co-published with Wirklichkeit Books
Edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas
Design by HIT
Cover artwork by Myriam Boulos
Softcover, 176 pages, 7 x 4.3 inches
ISBN: 978-3-948200-22-0
Edition of 3,000
Printed in the Czech Republic
$18 USD
Pre-order (ships in October)
About the book
Ali, a self-denigrating Catholic and unruly homosexual who immigrated to Berlin almost a decade ago from southern Lebanon, stands accused of assaulting a police officer during a Palestine solidarity demonstration. Caught in a suspended present as he faces possible deportation from Germany, Ali prepares to bid his goodbyes to a city in ebullition. The many people in his life pierce through the dense fog of days: Francesco, an Italian ex-boyfriend afflicted with the malady of hope; Samira, his tenacious confidante and the bearer of her Syrian community’s burdens; and, somewhere far away, his father Karim, who took arms with the communists against the Israeli occupation in the 1980s. There are also the Germans, and the beast that slumbers in them—who knows what it remains capable of. Carried by tragic humor and political reckoning, Fear Eats Ali is a forthright novel about the time and place of resistance, the debt one carries in its wake, and the helplessness of men in the face of immense historical transformations.
About the author
Edwin Nasr was born in 1994 in Haret Sakher, Lebanon. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His writings on politics and contemporary art have been published in Bidoun, n+1, Afterall Journal, The Funambulist, Mousse Magazine, and Mada Masr. He is the Senior Editor of Palestine is everywhere (TBA21, Silver Press, and the87press, 2025) and translates from French to English for different publications.
About the co-publisher
Wirklichkeit Books, founded in 2019 in Berlin, is a publisher of books on art, language, and politics.
Praise
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, author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
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
Press
"16 New Books on Palestine We're Excited About This Fall," The Key, September 24, 2026