Native: Dispatches From An Israeli-Palestinian Life

"Native is a collection of the satirical columns that Sayed Kashua wrote for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz over the course of several years. They’re funny — kinda. A laugh-so-they-can’t-see-what-you’re-getting-away-with kind of funny, except when they’re seriously funny or surreally funny or that kind of funny that comes from laughing at someone who suffers with a certain amount of sad-sack elan. I don’t know if there’s a word for that. Like schadenfreude without the guilt. The columns are autobiographical — they track Kashua, his neighbors in Jerusalem, his family and his career to form a kind of novel/memoir about a newspaper writer telling stories about being a newspaper writer and about being a Palestinian in Israel during the Arab Spring and the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014."