While half the world swept west,we trickled eastward, one by one,single-file, like fugitives. Next stop:Abu Dhabi, where my father had a job,and money, for the first time in years . . .__________________________________________________Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from pre...

High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest. Exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast’s wildfire epidemic, Naffis-Sahely’s reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region’s hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US, travelling from Venice and Florenc...

The Other Side of Nowhere is a radical, psychedelic journal of the end- times, whose poems portray a world of intransigence, a world where the safety of words like place or home have started to unravel. This pamphlet finds the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) exploring the American West, from forgotten gold rush towns in Arizona to the lives of historical figures from the Golden State's xenophobic history, allowing Naffis-Sahely to turn his wry worldly...

For more than four decades, Michael Hofmann has made significant contributions to the literary cultures of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ranging from his original poetry to translations of Kafka, Brecht, Hans Fallada, and Joseph Roth, among others. In the first book-length study of this iconic figure, poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely surveys Hofmann’s life and work with an emphasis on his poetry, situating him within the “New Generation” of writers, including C...

The Spring 2021 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”As guest-editor Laura van den Berg writes in her introduction, “At its core, literatu...

It was a battle that change the course of history, and was immortalized in a massive painting by Leonardo da Vinci that was thought lost for centuries . . . until now.On a sweltering day in June 1440, near the Tuscan town of Anghiari, the simmering conflict among Italy’s principal powers exploded into a battle whereby Florence and the papal States joined with Venice to defeat the previously unstoppable army of Milan. The shocking denoument would open the way for th...

Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020Winner of an English PEN AwardIntroduced by Jim Moore, with an interview by Christopher SchaeferBeyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco's greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laâbi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laâbi's p...

Now bankrupt after some failed gambles, Aristide Saccard, the former kingpin of the Paris Stock Exchange, desperately wants to get back to the top of the financial pile. When his powerful brother, the government minister Eugene Rougon, refuses to help him, he forms a partnership with the engineer Hamelin and founds the Banque Universelle, which speculates on public works in the Middle East. But as his greed and desire to outplay his rivals gets the better of him, the dashing and ruthless S...

Finally available in English, Le Règne de la barbarie by Abdellatif Laâbi is one of the most daring poetic visions of the second half of the twentieth century. First published in 1976 when Laabi was serving an eight-year prison sentence (1972-1980) for ‘crimes of opinion’ against the Moroccan State, The Rule of Barbarism is a devastating flight through consciousness, acquainting the reader with the trials of a society caught between a colonial past and the tragic realitie...

On 22 February 1942 Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular authors of his generation, committed suicide with his wife Lotte. The final, desperate gesture of this great writer has fascinated ever since.Zweig was an exile, driven from his home in Austria by the Nazis. Fleeing first to London, then New York, trying always to escape both those who demonised him and those who acclaimed him, he eventually took his young bride to Brazil, where they were haunted by the life they'd been forc...

"This powerful book of cultural criticism" by the renowned art historian "shines a harsh light on" a historic city's destruction in the name of profit ( The Washington Post).What is Venice worth? To whom do its irreplaceable treasures belong? This eloquent book by art historian Salvatore Settis urgently poses these questions, igniting a new debate about urban stewardship and cultural patrimony at large. As Venice grows increasingly unaffordable and inhospi...

A fascinatingly diverse anthology of the literature of exile, from the myths of Ancient Egypt to contemporary poetryExile lies at the root of our earliest stories. Charting varied experiences of people forced to leave their homes from the ancient world to the present day, The Heart of a Stranger is an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages....