A city where myth and catastrophe have become impossible to separate.
Janus City is a lyrical essay interweaving a personal, political, and mythological history of Beirut, a place as much of beguiling legend as it is of political disaster. Said to have been destroyed and rebuilt no fewer than seven times, Beirut has endured a fifteen-year civil war, a restless peace, a catastrophic economic collapse, one of the world's largest non-nuclear explosions, and, most recently, successive wars. Each calamity makes more porous the border between myth and reality, between the interior landscape of imagination and the exterior chaos of the ancient port city.
Part personal memoir and part excavation of political collapse, Janus City is ultimately a tribute to a beloved, complicated city, and an attempt to understand what it means to make a home in a place balanced eternally on the rim of disaster.