Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Canceled Memories
Set during the Lebanese civil war, this novel chronicles the splintering of the Al-Mukhtars, a Lebanese family whose love and trust for one another is strained by the increasing economic, social, and psychological tensions that surround them. Huda, feeling helpless as a housewife, pursues a career as a university professor and immerses herself in her work and students. Sharif, trapped in a static bureaucratic position, begins to resent his wife’s success and slowly withdraws from his family. When their marriage dissolves, the couple fight over the custody of their adolescent daughter. In a patriarchal society that favors the rights of the father, Huda is powerless as her daughter is taken ...
The Pistachio Seller
“It was Saturday. I remember. And while he was standing on a step ladder in the hall, changing a light bulb in the faint light coming through the window, I decided to love him.” So begins this wonderfully exuberant novel of quixotic adolescent longing and the enduring search for self. Set in middle class urban Egypt, the story chronicles young Wafaa’s struggle to come to terms with her own sexuality and her romantic infatuation with her cousin Ashraf, a spoiled and confident young Egyptian who was educated in England. Ashraf’s worldliness and carefree attitudes stand in sharp contrast to Wafaa’s provincial Islamic piousness. As both mature they find outside events encroaching upon ...
Thieves in Retirement
Hamdi Abu Golayyel offers a striking portrait of a marginalized Egyptian community, bringing to life the absurd and tragic characters who occupy the margins of society while paying tribute to a historical Cairene neighborhood. By turns comic, reverential, beautiful, and tawdry, the novel reveals a social climate where ruthlessness and goodness seem almost indistinguishable and humanity is on display in all its rich variety. The novelist’s distinctive vision of Egypt’s various postmonarchy political regimes and ideologies shapes this dark comedy of human relations and underground pursuits in late twentieth-century Egypt. Through intricate levels of allegory, puns, and double meanings, Abu...
Beyond Love
Hussein’s starkly beautiful novel Beyond Love plunges us into the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath. Huda, the young woman at the center of the story, experiences the deprivation and humiliation of life in sanctioned Iraq, working in the satirically named al-Amal factory (factory of hope) making men’s underwear. While surveillance and fear permeate daily life, Huda dares to vote “no” in the referendum for Saddam Hussein. This courageous act could have led to her death had she not fled to the closest border, Jordan, where the novel begins. Huda is not alone: Iraqi exiles are legion there, all waiting to be relocated and start new lives. Unable to go home or to feel settled in a foreign city, she struggles to overcome her grief and haunting memories of the war and the Shi’ite uprising. In letters, diaries, and oral stories, Hussein’s characters viscerally portray the pain of war and the alienation of exile. Originally published in Arabic in 2003, Beyond Love introduces English-language readers to one of the leading voices in Iraqi fiction today.
Contemporary Iraqi Fiction
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.
Translating the Counterculture
If countercultural literature is meant to "counter" a culture, what happens when another culture borrows that critique? Translating the Counterculture addresses that question by examining the reception of the Beat Generation in Turkey. There, the Beat message of dissent is being given renewed life as publishers, editors, critics, readers, and others dissatisfied with the conservative social and political trends in the country have turned to the Beats and other countercultural forebears for alternatives. Through an examination of a broad range of literary translations, media portrayals, interviews, and other related materials, Translating the Counterculture seeks to uncover how the Beats and ...
Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature
This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Turkish literature within both a local and global context. Across eight thematic sections a collection of subject experts use close readings of literature materials to provide a critical survey of the main issues and topics within the literature. The chapters provide analysis on a wide range of genres and text types, including novels, poetry, religious texts, and drama, with works studied ranging from the fourteenth century right up to the present day. Using such a historic scope allows the volume to be read across cultures and time, while simultaneously contextualizing and investigating how modern Turkish literature interacts with world lit...
Formalizing Displacement
In this book, Umut Özsu situates population transfer within the broader history of international law by examining its emergence as a legally formalized mechanism of nation-building in the early twentieth century. The book's principal focus is the 1922-34 compulsory exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey, a crucially important endeavor whose legal dimensions remain under-scrutinized.
Kindred Voices
The fascinating story of how premodern Anatolia’s multireligious intersection of cultures shaped its literary languages and poetic masterpieces By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a place of stunning cultural diversity. Kindred Voices explores how the region’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities. This convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period’s literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era’s major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem.
Time in Early Modern Islam
Stephen Blake compares the Islamic concept of time across the empires of the Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals. Each empire, while mindful of earlier models, created a new temporal system, fashioning a new solar calendar and era and a new round of rituals and ceremonies from the cultural resources at hand. The book not only contributes to our understanding of the origins and transformation of the Muslim temporal system but also explains the impact of Islamic science on the West.
