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Three short novels--including Prix Goncourt-winning The Patience Stone--that convey years of Afghan history, heartache, and hope. Never before in paperback. Atiq Rahimi's reputation for writing war stories of immense drama and intimacy began with his first novel, Earth and Ashes, about fathers and sons and the terrible strain inflicted on families, when an Afghan village is destroyed by the Russian army. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear takes place in 1979, during a period of social and political upheaval in Kabul. On the way home from a night of drinking, a university student named Farhad is arrested and brutally beaten. A few hours later, broken and confused, he slowly regains consciousn...
A young woman prays at her husband's bedside as he lies in a coma with a bullet in his neck. From outside come the sounds of tanks, gunshots, screaming and, most terrifying of all, silence. Inside, her two frightened daughters call to her from the hallway. As she tries to keep her husband alive, the woman rages against men, war, culture, God. Even as her mind appears to unravel, she becomes intensely clear-sighted. Now is her chance - her first ever - to speak without being censored. Her husband's body reminds her of the legend of the patience stone, a stone that hears all confessions until it explodes, and finally, spurred to new heights of daring, she spills out her most explosive secret.
Three short novels—including Prix Goncourt–winning The Patience Stone —that convey years of Afghan history, heartache, and hope. Never before in paperback. Atiq Rahimi’s reputation for writing war stories of immense drama and intimacy began with his first novel, Earth and Ashes, about fathers and sons and the terrible strain inflicted on families, when an Afghan village is destroyed by the Russian army. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear takes place in 1979, during a period of social and political upheaval in Kabul. On the way home from a night of drinking, a university student named Farhad is arrested and brutally beaten. A few hours later, broken and confused, he slowly regains con...
Earth and Ashes is a story of such spareness and power it leaves the reader reeling. Set during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, it is a fable about war, family, home and tradition. An old man and his grandson sit in a deserted landscape of dusty roads and looming mountains. What are they waiting for? As we watch them we learn their story... Atiq Rahimi has managed to condense centuries of Afghan history into his short tale of three very different generations. At the same time, he has created a story that is universal in its power.
For every crime, there must be a punishment... Rassoul’s world consists of little more than a squalid rented room – strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad – and his beloved fiancée Sophia, for whom he would do anything. So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel’s anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul. Amid the war-torn streets, Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime. Instead he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law, where the lines between fact and fiction, dream and reality, become dangerously blurred. Blackly comic, with flashes of poetry as well as brilliant irony, Atiq Rahimi's latest novel is an ingenious recasting of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and a transgressive satire with a frightening resonance all its own.
"Set in Kabul just before the Soviet invasion of December 1979, this extraordinary book is both the story of a student in fear for his life, and the story of Afghanistan - a beautiful, wounded country torn apart by religion and politics. Its action takes place over just two nights; its events are triggered by the random persecution of a young man as he makes his way home one evening, a little drunk, and is set upon by soldiers. Beaten to a pulp, Farhad is dragged by a strange woman into her house where he spends the night half believing he has died and is suffering the deserved punishment of an infidel. Yet as the reality of his situation starts to assert itself and he learns the terrible st...
François-Marie Banier's portraits of immigrants on the streets of Paris Produced at the size of a real passport and pairing Banier's photos with lyrical text fragments by Atiq Rahimi, Passport is a compassionate look at exile, "foreignness" and belonging.
This volume addresses trauma not only from a theoretical, descriptive and therapeutic perspective, but also through the survivor as narrator, meaning maker, and presenter. By conceptualising different outlooks on trauma, exploring transfigurations in writing and art, and engaging trauma through scriptotherapy, dharma art, autoethnography, photovoice and choreography, the interdisciplinary dialogue highlights the need for rethinking and re-examining trauma, as classical treatments geared towards healing do not recognise the potential for transfiguration inherent in the trauma itself. The investigation of the fissures, disruptions and shifts after punctual traumatic events or prolonged exposur...
The boy known as Tor Baz—the black falcon —wanders between tribes. He meets men who fight under different flags, and women who risk everything if they break their society’s code of honour. Where has he come from, and where will destiny take him? Set in the decades before the rise of the Taliban, Jamil Ahmad’s stunning debut takes us to the essence of human life in the forbidden areas where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet. Today the ‘tribal areas’ are often spoken about as a remote region, a hotbed of conspiracies, drone attacks and conflict. In The Wandering Falcon, this highly traditional, honour-bound culture is revealed from the inside for the first time. Wi...
Bringing together 28 acclaimed women writers, artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs from across Europe, this powerful and timely anthology looks at an ever-changing Europe from a variety of perspectives and offers hope and insight into how we might begin to rebuild.