Middle East Literature In Translation
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The House of the Edrisis
by Ghazaleh Alizadeh
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
"Like all revolutions, this one too has led to a regime more despotic than the one it replaced." So observes an omniscient narrator in Ghazaleh Alizadeh's monumental novel The House of the Edrisis, offering a darkly comedic glimpse at the aftermath of an unnamed twentieth-century uprising. In this concluding volume, the revolutionary tumult that has consumed the aristocratic Edrisi family and their opulent mansion shows no signs of abating.
As a ragtag band of squatters-turned-rulers consolidates power through surveillance and intimidation, the novel's eccentric cast of characters is forced to reckon with upended social orders. Erstwhile revolutionaries become complicit enforcers of a new authoritarian regime, their lofty slogans of liberation curdling into doublespeak. At the center of this story stands the ancestral Edrisi manor-a fading palace that seems to contain multitudes. Its once-vibrant gardens and courtyards, rendered in lush descriptive passages, now serve as haunted stages for madness, romance, violence, and philosophical reflection in turn. Lauded as a crowning achievement of modern Persian literature, this first-ever English translation of The House of the Edrisis in two volumes offers an unforgettable immersion in one writer's vision of the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution.
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Contemporary Iraqi Fiction
An Anthology
by Shakir Mustafa
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
The first anthology of its kind in the West, Contemporary Iraqi Fiction gathers work from sixteen Iraqi writers, all translated from Arabic into English. Shedding a bright light on the rich diversity Iraqi experience, Shakir Mustafa has included selections by Iraqi women, Iraqi Jews now living in Israel, and Christians and Muslims living both in Iraq and abroad.
While each voice is distinct, they are united in writing about a homeland that has suffered under repression, censorship, war, and occupation. Many of the selections mirror these grim realities, forcing the writers to open up new narrative terrains and experiment with traditional forms. Muhammad Khodayyir's surrealist portraits of his home city, Basra, in an excerpt from Basriyyatha and the magical realism of Mayselun Hadi's "Calendars" both offer powerful expressions of the absurdity of everyday life. Themes range from childhood and family to war, political oppression, and interfaith relationships. Mustafa provides biographical sketches for the writers and an enlightening introduction, chronicling the evolution of Iraqi literature.
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A Cup of Sin
Selected Poems
by Simin Behbahani
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Simin Behbahani's collection contains some of the most formative work of twentieth-century Persian literature. Written over almost a half-century, much of her poetry reflects the traumatic experiences that have shaped Iranian history: revolution and war. Behbahani balances artful inquiry and shocking realism in both her language and imagery to probe the depths of political, cultural, and moral oppression. In the traditional verse of the ghazal, she improvises with meter to echo and provide new interpretations.
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Ibrahim the Mad and Other Plays
An Anthology of Modern Turkish Drama
by Various Authors
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Since the middle of the twentieth century, Turkish playwriting has been notable for its verve and versatility. This two-volume anthology is the first major collection of plays in English of modern Turkish drama, a selection dealing with ancient Anatolian mythology, Ottoman history, contemporary social issues and family dramas, ribald comedy from Turkey's cities and rural areas. It also includes several plays set outside Turkey.
The two volumes together will feature seventeen plays by major playwrights published or produced from the late 1940s to the present day, with volume 1,"Ibrahim the Mad" and Other Plays, encompassing plays from the 1940s through the 1960s, and volume 2, "I, Anatolia" and Other Plays, including plays from the 1970s through the 1990s. They grant to English readers the pleasure of riveting drama in translations that are colloquial as well as faithful. For producers, directors, and actors they provide a wealth of fresh, new material, with characters ranging from Ottoman sultans to a Soviet cosmonaut, from the Byzantine Empress Theodora to a fisherman's wife, from residents of an Istanbul neighborhood to King Midas, from Montezuma to a Turkish cabinet minister.
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Waiting for the Past
A Novel
by Hadiya Hussein
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Hadiya Hussein's poignant 2017 novel plunges readers into a haunting and powerful story of resilience. Set at the end of Saddam Hussein's brutal reign, the novel follows Narjis, a young Iraqi woman, on her quest to discover what has become of the man she loves. Yusef, suspected by the regime of being a dissident, has disappeared-presumably either imprisoned or executed. On her journey, Narjis receives shelter from a Kurdish family who welcome her into their home where she meets Umm Hani, an older woman who is searching for her long-lost son. Together they form a bond, and Narjis comes to understand the depth of loss and grief of those around her. At the same time, she is introduced to the warm hospitality of the Kurdish community, settling into their everyday lives, and embracing their customs. Barbara Romaine's translation skillfully renders this complex, layered story, giving readers a stark yet beautiful portrait of contemporary Iraq.
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Hot Maroc
A Novel
by Yassin Adnan
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
With an infectious blend of humor, satire, and biting social commentary, Yassin Adnan gives readers a portrait of contemporary Morocco-and the city of Marrakech-told through the eyes of the hapless Rahhal Laâouina, a.k.a. the Squirrel. Painfully shy, not that bright, and not all that popular, Rahhal somehow imagines himself a hero. With a useless degree in ancient Arabic poetry, he finds his calling in the online world, where he discovers email, YouTube, Facebook, and the news site Hot Maroc. Enamored of the internet and the thrill of anonymity it allows, Rahhal opens the Atlas Cubs Cyber Café, where patrons mingle virtually with politicians, journalists, hackers, and trolls. However, Rahhal soon finds himself mired in the dark side of the online world-one of corruption, scandal, and deception.
Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017, Hot Maroc is a vital portrait of the challenges Moroccans, young and old, face today. Where press freedoms are tightly controlled by government authorities, where the police spy on, intimidate, and detain citizens with impunity, and where adherence to traditional cultural icons both anchors and stifles creative production, the online world provides an alternative for the young and voiceless. In this revolutionary novel that recalls Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Dave Eggers's The Circle, Adnan fixes his lens on young Rahhal and his contemporaries as they navigate the perilous and changing landscape of the real and virtual worlds they inhabit.
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Abundance from the Desert
Classical Arabic Poetry
by Raymond Farrin
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Abundance from the Desert provides a comprehensive introduction to classical Arabic poetry, one of the richest of poetic traditions. Covering the period roughly from 500 c.e. to 1250 a.d., it features original translations and illuminating discussions of a number of major classical Arabic poems from a variety of genres. The poems are presented chronologically, each situated within a specific historical and literary context. Together, the selected poems suggest the range and depth of classical Arabic poetic expression; read in sequence, they suggest the gradual evolution of a tradition.
Moving beyond a mere chronicle, Farrin outlines a new approach to appreciating classical Arabic poetry based on an awareness of concentric symmetry, in which the poem's unity is viewed not as a linear progression but as an elaborate symmetrical plot. In doing so, the author presents these works in a broader, comparative light, revealing connections with other literatures. The reader is invited to examine these classical Arabic works not as isolated phenomena―notwithstanding their uniqueness and their association with a discrete tradition―but rather as part of a great multicultural heritage.
This pioneering book marks an important step forward in the study of Arabic poetry. At the same time, it opens the door to this rich poetic tradition for the general reader.
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The Ant's Gift
A Study of the Shahnameh
by Shahrokh Meskoob
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Shahrokh Meskoob was, one of Iran's leading intellectuals and a preeminent scholar of Persian literary traditions, language, and cultural identity. In The Ant's Gift, Meskoob applies his insight and considerable analytical skills to the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran completed in 1010 by the poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi. Tracing Iran's history from its first mythical king to the fall of the Sasanian dynasty, the Shahnameh includes myths, romance, history, and political theory. Meskoob sheds new light on this seminal work of Persian culture, identifying the story as at once a historical and poetic work. While, previous criticism of the Shahnameh has focused on its linguistic importance and its role in Iranian nationalism, Meskoob draws attention to the work's pre-Islamic cultural origins.
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Animals in Our Days
A Book of Stories
by Mohamed Makhzangi
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Each story in Mohamed Makhzangi's unique collection Animals in Our Days features a different animal species and its fraught relationship with humans-water buffalo in a rural village gone mad from electric lights, brass grasshoppers purchased in a crowded Bangkok market, or ghostly rabbits that haunt the site of a long-ago brutal military crackdown. Other stories tell of bear-trainers in India and of the American invasion of Iraq as experienced by a foal, deer, and puppies.
Originally published in 2006, Makhzangi's stories are part of a long tradition of writings on animals in Arabic literature. In this collection, animals offer a mute testament to the brutality and callousness of humanity, particularly when modernity sunders humans from the natural environment. Makhzangi is one of Egypt's most perceptive and nuanced authors, merging a writer's empathy with a scientist's curiosity about the world.
Like Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, or J. M. Coetzee's Lives of Animals, Makhzangi's stories trace the numinous, almost supernatural, connections between our species and others. In these resonant, haunting tales, Animals in Our Days foregrounds our urgent need to reacquire the sense of awe, humility, and respect that once characterized our relationship with animals.
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Hafez in Love
A Novel
by Iraj Pezeshkzad
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez is in love. He is in love with a girl, with a city, and with Persian poetry. Despite his enmity with the new and dangerous city leader, the jealousy of his fellow court poets, and the competition for his beloved, Iran's favorite poet remains unbothered. When his wit and charm are not enough to keep him safe in Shiraz, his friends conspire to keep him out of trouble. But, their schemes are unsuccessful. Nothing will chase Hafez from this city of wine and roses.
In Pezeshkzad's fictional account, Hafez's life in fourteenth-century Shiraz is a mix of peril and humor. Set in a city that is at once beautiful and cutthroat, the novel includes, a cast of historical figures to illuminate this elusive poet of the Persian literary tradition. Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins's translation brings the beloved poetry of Hafez alive for an English audience and reacquaints readers with the comic wit and original storytelling of Pezeshkzad.
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Packaged Lives
Ten Stories and a Novella
by Haifa Zangana
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
The carefully crafted, subtle, and humorous stories in Packaged Lives show Zangana at her best as a fiction writer. She portrays her subjects keenly, sensitively, and lovingly but without compromise. Iraqis living in exile come to life in her narratives as men and women, who are caught between two worlds. They cannot return to their homeland and are forced to wait for news of Iraq from afar. At the same time, they are unable to fully adjust to life in Britain and make a new home for themselves. The question "What is home?" is at the heart of each story in this collection. Her protagonists, who are stuck in ready-made lives, or "packaged lives," struggle to set themselves free from a web of relationships in which they are entangled. Art, poetry, and nature provide lines of escape. The relief may be fleeting, but the peace of mind and serenity are reached through the moment of epiphany at the end of each story, a much-needed balm.
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Solitaire
A Novel
by Hassouna Mosbahi
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
In Hassouna Mosbahi's engrossing and keenly observed novel, he takes readers deep into one day in the life of Yunus, a Tunisian intellectual. A professor of French language and Flaubert specialist, Yunis is recently retired and separated from his wife, as he leaves the city to settle in the Tunisian coastal city of Nabeul. Searching for solitude, he hopes to spend the remainder of his life among the books he loves. On the day of his sixtieth birthday, Yunus plunges into a delayed midlife crisis as he reflects on the major moments in his life, from taking up writing as a young man to his career as a university professor to his failed marriage. Yunus's identity crisis mirrors that of his Tunisian homeland with its tumultuous history of political and cultural upheaval. He meditates on the lives of his friends, drawing from his memory a colorful cast of characters whose experiences reflect the outsized influence of religion and tradition in their lives. Through the eyes of Yunus, Mosbahi's elegiac, literary novel explores life and death, love and writing, and the relationship between puritanism and extremism in the Arab world today.
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The Slave Yards
A Novel
by Najwa Bin Shatwan
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Set in late nineteenth-century Benghazi, Najwa Bin Shatwan's powerful novel tells the story of Atiqa, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master. We meet Atiqa as a grown woman, happily married with two children and working. When her cousin Ali unexpectedly enters her life, Atiqa learns the true identity of her parents, both long deceased, and slowly builds a friendship with Ali as they share stories of their past.
We learn of Atiqa's childhood, growing up in the "slave yards," a makeshift encampment on the outskirts of Benghazi for Black Africans who were brought to Libya as slaves. Ali narrates the tragic life of Atiqa's mother, Tawida, a black woman enslaved to a wealthy merchant family who finds herself the object of her master's desires. Though such unions were common in slave-holding societies, their relationship intensifies as both come to care deeply for each other and share a bond that endures throughout their lives.
Shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Ficiton, Bin Shatwan's unforgettable novel offers a window into a dark chapter of Libyan history and illuminates the lives of women with great pathos and humanity.
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The House of the Edrisis, Volume One
A Novel
by Ghazaleh Alizadeh
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh's The House of the Edrisis is a novel deeply rooted in historical and cultural significance inviting readers into a world of revolution, power, and societal transformation. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the unfolding drama among a colorful cast of disgraced family members and disillusioned revolutionaries.
Set in Central Asia, Alizadeh's story cleverly parallels the Islamic Revolution in Iran and offers an intimate portrait of both young ideologues-turned-tyrants and jaded women whose hope for change slowly fades. With a sardonic tone and elements of black comedy and farce, The House of the Edrisis offers an engrossing reflection on a turbulent history and the enduring spirit of men and women living through it.
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In the Alley of the Friend
On the Poetry of Hafez
by Shahrokh Meskoob
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
The celebrated and beloved fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez continues to play an essential role in the lives of Iranians today. For centuries, scholars have studied his work, exploring both his life and his deeply moving poetry of love, spirituality, and protest. Yet, Shahrokh Meskoob is one of the first scholars to take an innovative approach to Hafez's poetry. Meskoob goes beyond a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of Hafez's poetry in the Divan to access the interior thoughts of the poet and summon his spirit in the process of understanding Hafez's mysticism.
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Allah's Spacious Earth
by Omar Sayfo
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Allah's Spacious Earth is a stunningly fresh and timely political dystopia that depicts the tragic yet very real consequences of tensions between majority populations and Muslim minorities in the Western world. The novel is set in an imagined future where anti-Muslim sentiment and political pressure lead to a community being cut off from the rest of society. Told from the perspective of Nasim, a young Muslim living in the Zone-an urban area within one of the states forming the Pan-European Federation-the story follows his journey as he struggles with the restrictions imposed upon him along with the expectations of his community.
In the tradition of Michel Houellbecq's Submission, Allah's Spacious Earth is a powerful novel of ideas that brilliantly captures a growing fear in Western societies and its devastating fallout.
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Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language
by Abdelfattah Kilito
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
It has been said that the difference between and language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army. Both the act of translation and bilingualism are steeped in a tension between surrender and conquest, yielding conscious and unconscious effects on language. First published in 2002, Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shall Not Speak My Language explores this tension in his address of the dynamics of literary influence and canon formation within the Arabic literary tradition. As one of the Arab world's most original and provocative literary critics, Kilito challenges the reader to reexamine contemporary notions of translation, bilingualism, postcoloniality, and the discipline of comparative literature. Wail S. Hassan's superb translation makes Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language available to an English audience for the first time, capturing the charm and elegance of the original in a chaste and seemingly effortless style.
At the center of Kilito's work, is his insistence on the ethics of translation. He explores the effects of translation on the genres of poetry, narrative prose, and philosophy. Kilito highlights the problem of cultural translation as an interpretive process, and as an essential element of comparative literary studies. In close readings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Rushd, al-Saffar, and al-Shidyaq, among others, he traces the shifts in attitude toward language and translation from the centuries of Arab cultural ascendancy to the contemporary period, interrogating along the way how the dynamics of power mediate literary encounters across cultural, linguistic, and political lines.
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Island of Bewilderment
A Novel of Modern Iran
by Simin Daneshvar
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Twenty-six-year-old college graduate, artist, and employee of the Ministry of Art and Culture, Hasti Nourian aspires to be a "new woman"-independent-minded, strong-willed, and in control of her own destiny. A destiny that includes Morad, an idealistic young architect and artist with whom Hasti is deeply in love. Morad is a sharp critic of Iran's Westernized bourgeois class, the one that Hasti's mother relishes. After Hasti's father died, her mother had married a wealthy businessman and moved to an exclusive neighborhood of northern Tehran.
Socializing with a mixed group of Americans, English-speaking Iranians, and British expats, her mother's life revolves around gym visits, hairdressers, and party planning. When her mother persuades Hasti to join her at the spa, she introduces her to Salim, an eligible young man from a wealthy family whose British education and proper comportment, as well as his economic status, make him an ideal suitor for Hasti in her mother's eyes. Against her better judgment, Hasti finds herself attracted to Salim and tempted by her mother's comfortable lifestyle. As the novel unfolds, Hasti is torn between her first love and the radical politics of her university friends, and her love for her mother and the freedom economic security can bring.
Set in Tehran in the mid-1970s, just a few years before the 1977–79 revolution, Daneshvar's unforgettable novel depicts the tumultuous social, cultural, and economic changes of the day through the intimate story of a young woman's struggle to find her identity.
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We Never Swim in the Same River Twice
by Hassouna Mosbahi
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
During Tunisia's Arab Spring and its tilt toward Islamism, we meet three friends: Saleem, who is about to turn fifty and whose once-blissful marriage teeters on the edge as his mental health deteriorates; Aziz, a homely retired postal clerk who finds solace in literature and international cinema; and Omran, a well-traveled writer and public intellectual navigating a complex relationship with a young Franco-Tunisian woman who lives in Paris. As these men forge an unlikely friendship over drinks at a coastal bar in Bizerte and during walks on the beach, they grapple with the political extremism that dominates Tunisia's social and political life at the time. Repelled by Islamist rhetoric and the brand of masculinity it represents, the three friends recall their lives and question their relationship to their nation.
We Never Swim in the Same River Twice offers an alternative narrative of the Arab Spring, one that challenges Western media's depiction of a "blessed revolution," and gives readers an intimate and elegiac portrait of a recent period in Tunisian history.
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Arabs and the Art of Storytelling
A Strange Familiarity
by Abdelfattah Kilito
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
In Arabs and the Art of Storytelling, the eminent Moroccan literary historian and critic Kilito revisits and reassesses, in a modern critical light, many traditional narratives of the Arab world. He brings to such celebrated texts as A Thousand and One Nights, Kalila and Dimna, and Kitab al-Bukhala' refreshing and iconoclastic insight, giving new life to classic stories that are often treated as fossilized and untouchable cultural treasures. For Arab scholars and readers, poetry has for centuries taken precedence, overshadowing narrative as a significant literary genre. Here, Kilito demonstrates the key role narrative has played in the development of Arab belles lettres and moral philosophy. His urbane style has earned him a devoted following among specialists and general readers alike, making this translation an invaluable contribution to an English-speaking audience.
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A Child From the Village
by Sayyid Qutb
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Well known throughout the Islamic world as the foundational thinker for a significant portion of the contemporary Muslim intelligentsia, Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was jailed by Gamal Abdul Nasser's government in 1954. He became one of the most uncompromising voices of the movement we now call Islamism and is perhaps best known for his book, Ma`lam fi al-tariq.
A Child from the Village was written just prior to Qutb's conversion to the Islamist cause and reflects his concerns for social justice. Interst in Qutb's writing has increased in the West since Islamism has emerged as a power on the world scene.
In this memoir, Qutb recalls his childhood in the village of Musha in Upper Egypt. He chronicles the period between 1912 and 1918, a time immensely influential in the creation of modern Egypt. Written with much tenderness toward childhood memories, it has become a classic in modern Arabic autobiography. Qutb offers a clear picture of Egyptian village life in the early twentieth century, its customs and lore, educational system, religious festivals, relations with the central government, and the struggle to modernize and retain its identity. Translators John Calvert and William Shepard capture the beauty and intensity of Qutb's prose.
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Turkey, Egypt, and Syria
A Travelogue
by Shibli Numani
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue vividly captures the experiences of prominent Indian intellectual and scholar Shibli Nu'mani (1857-1914) as he journeyed across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1892. A professor of Arabic and Persian at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College at Aligarh, Nu'mani took a six-month leave from teaching to travel to the Ottoman Empire in search of rare printed works and manuscripts to use as sources for a series of biographies on major figures in Islamic history. Along the way, he collected information on schools, curricula, publishers, and newspapers, presenting a unique portrait of imperial culture at a transformative moment in the history of the Middle East. Nu'mani records sketches and anecdotes that offer rare glimpses of intellectual networks, religious festivals, visual and literary culture, and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. First published in 1894, the travelogue has since become a classic of Urdu travel writing and has been immensely influential in the intellectual and political history of South Asia. This translation, the first into English, includes contemporary reviews of the travelogue, letters written by the author during his travels, and serialized newspaper reports about the journey, and is deeply enriched for readers and students by the translator's copious multilingual glosses and annotations. Nu'mani's chronicle offers unique insight into broader processes of historical change in this part of the world while also providing a rare glimpse of intellectual engagement and exchange across the porous borders of empire.
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Moroccan Folktales
by Jilali Koudia
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Drawing on stories he heard as a boy from female relatives, Jilali El Koudia presents a cross-section of utterly bewitching narratives. Filled with ghouls and fools, kind magic and wicked, eternal bonds and earthly wishes, these are mesmerizing stories to be savored, studied, or simply treasured. Varied genres include anecdotes, legends, and animal fables, and some tales bear a strong resemblance to European counterparts, for example, Aamar and his Sister (Hansel and Gretel) and Nunja and the White Dove (Cinderella). All capture the heart of Morroco and the soul of its people.
In an enlightening introduction, El Koudia mourns the loss of the teller of tales in the marketplace, and he makes it clear that storytelling, born of memory and oral tradition, could vanish in the face of mass and electronic media.
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Gaia, Queen of Ants
by Hamid Ismailov
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past.
One of Ismailov's few novels written in Uzbek, Gaia, Queen of Ants offers a rare portrait of a complex and little-known part of the world. A plot centered on political corruption and ethnic conflict is punctuated with Sufi philosophy and religious gullibility. As Ismailov's characters grapple with questions of faith, power, sex, and family, Gaia, Queen of Ants presents a moving tale of universal themes set against a Central Asian backdrop in the twenty-first century.
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Salt Journals
Tunisian Women On Political Imprisonment
by Various Authors
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Salt Journals is a compelling collection of essays by Tunisian women, sharing their personal experiences with dictatorship and oppression. While rooted in the history and culture of Tunisia, these narratives reflect universal feelings of isolation, pain, and the indomitable quest for freedom.
Drawn from a variety of different professions, including a lawyer, an engineer, a nurse, a student, and a city council member, among others, these women are contesting the culture of silence surrounding women's prison narratives. Employing words as their weapons of nonviolent resistance, the authors recount the harsh realities of a militarized state and its oppressive prison system. Their creative defiance against state repression emerges not just as a means of survival, but as a profound act of dissidence, reclaiming control from the brutality imposed upon their lives.
A testament to the power of self-representation, Salt Journals opens a vital space for dialogue on the necessity of empathy, resilience, and the importance of speaking out in the face of tyranny.
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The Heart of Lebanon
by Ameen Rihani
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
When celebrated mahjar writer Ameen Rihani returned to his native Lebanon from his long stay in New York, he set out on nine journeys through the Lebanese countryside, from the rising mountains to the shores of the Mediterranean, to experience and document the land in intimate detail.
Through his travelogue The Heart of Lebanon, Rihani brings his readers along by foot and by mule to explore rural villages like his childhood home of Freike, the flora and fauna of massive cedar forests, and archaeological sites that reveal the history of Lebanon. Meeting goatherds, healers, monks, and more along the way, Rihani offers more than vivid descriptions of the country's sweeping scenery. His candid and often humorous narration captures what he sees as the soul of Lebanon and its people. Allen's fluid translation transports English-language readers to an early twentieth-century rural Lebanon of the writer's time in a way that only Rihani's firsthand account can accomplish.
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Sour Grapes
by Zakaria Tamer
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
Set in the Syrian neighborhood of al-Qaweyq, “Sour Grapes” is a collection of fifty-nine wry, satirical short stories loosely connected by a cast of rotating characters living at society's margins. Tamer captures their everyday lives, weaving the attendant cruelties and ironies of living under an oppressive regime with the residents' irreverence and small acts of defiance. Inspired by the heroines of Arab mythology, the women of al-Qaweyq navigate the patriarchal community with brash confidence and dark humor while the younger generation of children inherit a bitter cynicism from their fathers. Evoking under-ripened and immature fruit, the collection's title serves as a bittersweet metaphor for a world that possesses the seeds of change but is unprepared for the harvest.
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Fatma
A Novel of Arabia
by Raja Alem
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
'There was a blue cast to Satjma's handsomely sculpted mesmerizing tale of earthbound witchery and celestial love."
Fatma, an Arabian peasant girl, unwittingly embarks upon a strange journey of transformation the day her father marries her off to a snake handler. Unbeknownst to the new bride, her husband milks the venom of his snakes for use in potions he sells on the side. Bitten by one of the snakes, Fatma changes from naïve girl to sensuous woman. What's more, she now gains an arcane affinity for her husband's reptiles as well as a talent for controlling them. This trait will enable her to travel from the sands of Arabia to the shadows of the Netherworld beyond the realm of ordinary human experience.
Resonating with ritual and mystery, Fatma is a fabulous tale of one woman's path to ecstasy-an enraptured vision of enchantment in this world and fulfillment in another.
The first novel to be published in English by one of the most distinguished of modern Arabic writers, this imaginative work blends naturalistic prose, poetry, and song with all the magic of its author's abundant literary gifts.
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The Man of Middling Height
by Fadi Zaghmout
Part of the Middle East Literature In Translation series
What if our society's deepest prejudices weren't about race, gender, or sexuality—but height? In his groundbreaking allegorical novel, acclaimed Jordanian author and activist Fadi Zaghmout imagines just such a world, crafting a powerful meditation on discrimination and desire that speaks directly to our contemporary debates about identity and inclusion.
“The Man of Middling Height” follows a short dressmaker whose life is upended when she meets Tallan, a man whose middle height places him outside the rigid tall/short binary that governs their society. As their forbidden romance blossoms, they must navigate a world where height determines everything from social status to romantic possibilities. Through their story and those of surrounding characters, including a short person in a polyamorous relationship with two tall partners, and a tall activist who scandalously loves another tall person, Zaghmout deftly reframes contemporary discussions about gender identity and sexuality through the lens of height discrimination.
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