"Jeff Talarigo offers a rare glimpse and alternative point of view into a place few people have dared to visit: the Gaza Strip. These linked stories expose the seven-decade-long Palestinian diaspora in a disquieting allegory of the clash between the occupied and the occupier. In 1993, Talarigo watched two Palestinian boys playing with an injured bird with a string around its neck. The boys tossed the bird into the air, waiting for it to fly before the string ran out, and the bird fell into the boys' hands. For nearly a year, the author carried this image with him before he wrote a story about the bird. This story became his first published piece of fiction about his Gaza journey. Jeff Talarigo is the author of two novels: The Pearl Diver and The Ginseng Hunter. He has lived in Gaza and Japan, and currently resides in Oakland, California"--

"It is late 1948 and days before his wife is to give birth for the first time, Ghassan, is approached by two talking jackals threatening him that, if he doesn't paint the signs of the newly named villages and towns, his wife will give birth to a goat. Thus begins the exile to Gaza of Ghassan and his goat. Told in loosely linked stories, In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees explores the Palestinians seven-decade long diaspora. The history of modern day Gaza is told as it has never been told: through the eyes of a night guardian of a talking goat; a carrier pigeon that befriends a young boy who sells photos of martyrs; a refugee who eats books and then recites them word for word; a Palestinian father who sneaks animals into Gaza through a labyrinth of tunnels; a talking sheep who is caged in the Gaza Zoo. Woven throughout the novel, an American arrives in Gaza, witnessing the beauty and horror of this widely ignored place, leaving, months later, a person never again the same. In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees is a disquieting allegory of the clash between the occupied and the occupier"--