Selamlik, Khaled Alesmael
$19.99
A raw and sensual novel of queer desire and survival, Selamlik follows a young Syrian man navigating secret encounters in Damascus hammams, forbidden love, and the brutal realities of exile. Khaled Alesmael delivers an unflinching portrait of Arab masculinity, homoerotic longing, and the quiet defiance of pursuing pleasure and connection in a world determined to erase it.
1 in stock
Description
Selamlik
Paperback · April 2, 2024
by Khaled Alesmael, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
A raw, sensual, and unflinching novel of Arab masculinity, queer desire, and survival.
In Damascus, desire moves quietly. In parks after dark. In glances held a second too long. In the steam-filled hammams of the old city, where the scent of bay laurel soap clings to bare skin and bodies slip in and out of view.
Furat is in his early twenties when he begins cruising Sibki Park, drawn into a hidden world of men who want what they are never allowed to name. Inside the public baths, pleasure and danger coexist. Naked men hide in the steam. Touch is brief, charged, and unforgettable. Every encounter carries risk: of exposure, of violence, of disappearance.
As Furat searches for intimacy and love, he faces hostility from all sides—regime, religion, neighbors, strangers. When his world finally collapses, he is forced to flee, joining others on a brutal journey shaped by exile, loss, and relentless migration laws. Yet even in displacement and cold northern landscapes, desire refuses to vanish.
Selamlik is a powerful, homoerotic novel about what survives when everything else is stripped away. It is a story of bodies under surveillance, love under threat, and men who continue to seek connection—passion, pleasure, tenderness—despite the shame and fear imposed upon them.
Spare, sensual, and devastating, Selamlik insists that queer desire is not a weakness—but a form of resistance.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.