The first two essays in Poets from a War Torn World are about mysticism in modern Arabic poetry. The second two essays are about literary philosophy in modern Hebrew poetry. All four essays focus on the 1960s and 1970s, a time when poets hoped that through their writings they could help bring peace to a war torn Middle East.-----Reuven Snirs introduction is in clear simple language. It provides background knowledge that will assist the general reader who has no previous knowledge of specif...

The book On Screenwriting and Love and Politics: The Screenplay “Blue Mist,” is written in an engaging literary style. It attempts to illuminate the emotions, theories, and process that go into crafting a screenplay.----As a special appendix, the book includes the authors latest full-length screenplay Blue Mist. About this screenplay, Aviva says: “I write about love and politics. My screenplays are theatrical feature films on Middle Eastern subjects. This time with my screenplay Blue Mist,...

Gifts from an Empty Suitcase and Other Short Stories: And Twenty Poems presents an array of stories and poetry about people in our turbulent, modern world that encompasses both East and West. It is a world filled with tragedy and a growing refugee population.----The fate of birds is also interwoven within these tales of human joy and sadness.----These fascinating stories are truly Gifts, and are set in Egypt, Afghanistan, Michigan and Australia. The poems often complement the stories, with...

Previously unavailable in English, Salim Barakat’s Sages of Darkness depicts Kurdish life in the period of transition from a traditional tribal existence to half-hearted modernization under the Ottomans. A saga of the lives and deaths of two Kurdish chieftains and their families, it is filled with fantasy, humor and wonder as well as tragedy and devotion to the futile, and delves into the intertwined workings of history, mythology and memory. It is a landmark of Kurdish literature...

"Mafi's luminous translation brings the Persian poet Rumi's distinctive and timeless Sufi lessons to a new audience." — Foreword ReviewsThis fresh prose translation of 105 short teaching stories by Rumi, which form the core of the six-volume Masnavi, explores the hidden spiritual aspects of everyday experience. Rumi transforms the seemingly mundane events of daily life into profound Sufi teaching moments. These prose gems transport readers to the world of t...

From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonizationShortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough” work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy’s coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.So...

When Arcade Publishing originally contracted this extraordinary collection of poetry and literature, the Department of the Treasury was attempting to censor the publication of works from countries on America’s “enemies list.” Arcade, along with the PEN American Center, the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, and the Association of American University Presses, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the United States government. Their landmark...

This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is “an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets" (The New York Times Book Review).In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sens...

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood—the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the ...

The stories collected here are by leading authors of the short story form in the Middle East today. In addition to works by writers already wellknown in the West, such as Idwar al-Kharrat, Fu'ad al-Takarli and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, the collection includes stories by key authors whose fame has hitherto been restricted to the Middle East. This bilingual reader is ideal for students of Arabic as well as lovers of literature who wish to broaden their appreciation of the work of Mi...

One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."A contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting".Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ.On the third day of Ramadan, the villa...

Khartoum, according to one theory, takes its name from the Beja word hartooma, meaning meeting place . Geographically, culturally and historically, the Sudanese capital is certainly that: a meeting place of the Blue and White Niles, a confluence of Arabic and African histories, and a destination point for countless refugees displaced by Sudan s long, troubled history of forced migration.In the pages of this book the first major anthology of Sudanese stories to be translated into En...