Art & Culture

Assouline’s New Book is a Love Letter to Beirut

BYMille Team

August 18, 2026

It is difficult to talk about Beirut today without talking about what has happened to it. Over the past six years, the Lebanese capital has lived through an economic collapse that sent the currency into freefall, the August 4, 2020 port explosion that killed more than 200 people and destroyed large parts of the city, and successive waves of conflict that have brought war back to Lebanon.

For many people outside the country, these events have become the dominant image of Beirut. Search its name and you are likely to find photographs of smoke, damaged buildings, and displaced families. It is an understandable consequence of the news cycle, but it leaves very little room for everything else that has made Beirut Beirut. Assouline’s newest release, Beirut Habibi, arrives this month with a very different picture of the Lebanese capital.

Part of the publisher’s Classics Collection, the 304-page tome is written by Beirut-born Lebanese novelist and professor Charif Majdalani, whose career has included ten novels and two essays published in French. His 2025 novel, Le Nom des Rois, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt.

The book reaches much further back than Beirut’s recent history. Over thousands of years, the city has been a Phoenician port, Roman colony, part of the Ottoman Empire, and later the French mandate. Those periods left behind architecture, customs, and cultural influences that still shape the city today. Much of Beirut Habibi tells that story through photography.

One image shows Boulevard de Paris in 1972, when the hotels, casinos, and beaches along Beirut’s coast drew international visitors. Another captures Place des Canons in the 1950s, its streets filled with pedestrians and cars. There are photographs of Casino du Liban in the 1960s and Saint Georges Yacht Club in 1983, alongside smaller scenes of every day life, including men drinking tea and smoking nargile, women walking through the city, and Yazan Halwani’s mural of Fairuz in Gemmayze.

But the book avoids limiting Beirut to the past. Contemporary photographs take in Raouché, Gemmayze, the waterfront and the city after dark. The accompanying text looks at its galleries, restaurants, boutiques, and fashion industry, including Elie Saab’s Beirut ateliers. That feels important given how often conversations about Lebanon slip into nostalgia. Looking back at Beirut before the civil war can easily become an exercise in mourning a supposedly lost golden age. The problem is that doing so can make contemporary Beirut seem like an inferior version of itself, rather than a city where people are still working, designing, writing, opening restaurants, making art, and building lives.

The book also contains quotes from several of these people, alongside prominent international figures, including jewelry designer Selim Mouzannar, journalist Suzy Menkes, designer Cynthia Merhej, and illustrator Yasmina Keyrouz, who wrote: “Beirut is and will always be my main source of inspiration, even with all of her flaws and chaos. I like to believe that I owe it all to Beirut.”

The Lebanese capital is the latest Arab destination to receive the Assouline treatment. In recent years, the publisher has built up a substantial catalogue devoted to the region, from Dubai Wonder and Riyadh Infinite to books dedicated to AlUla, Abu Dhabi, the Red Sea coast, Al-Ahsa and other parts of Saudi Arabia. Assouline now groups 26 titles under its Middle East collection, covering everything from major cities to architecture, landscapes, crafts, and cultural traditions.

Assouline’s New Book is a Love Letter to Beirut

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Assouline’s New Book is a Love Letter to Beirut

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