Pay No Heed to the Rockets

Marcello Di Cintio first visited Palestine in 1999 and, like most outsiders, the Palestinian narrative he knew was one defined by unending struggle, a near-Sisyphean curse of stories of oppression, exile, and occupation told over and over again. In the summer of 2014, during a brief lull in the bombing from Israel's Operation Protective Edge, photos emerged of a young Gazan girl in a green dress sifting through the rubble of her destroyed home. She was looking for her books.

In Pay No Heed to the Rockets, Di Cintio travels to Palestine to find the girl. Using the form of a political-literary travelogue, he explores what literature means to modern Palestinians and how Palestinians make sense of the conflict between a rich imaginative life and the daily violence of survival. Taking the long route through the West Bank, into Jerusalem, across Israel and finally into Gaza, he...