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The Hidden Light of Objects
For fans of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country's growing hostility towards the West. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.
An Unlasting Home
Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she recognises less and less. Yet since her return from the States eleven years earlier, a certain inertia has kept her there. When she is accused of blasphemy, which carries with it the threat of execution, Sara realises she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all. Awaiting trial, Sara retraces the past, intent on examining the lives of the women who made her. She conjures forth her grandmothers - beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in Kuwait and later swept off to India by her wealthy merchant husband. An Unlasting Home brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable family portrait and a spellbinding epic tale.
The Book of Gaza
Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Strip to Jerusalem, Cairo or Beirut, where they then had to be typed up. Consequently, fiction grew shorter, novels became novellas, and short stories flourished as the city's form of choice. Indeed, to Palestinians elsewhere, Gaza became known as 'the exporter of oranges and short stories'. This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story from that era, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, of what it means to be a Palestinian, and how that identity is continually being reforged; stories of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what many have called 'the largest prison in the world'.
Routes and Realms
Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land in formal texts from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. These texts reveal that territories were imagined specifically as homes, cities, and regions and acted as powerful categories of belonging in the early Islamic world.
The Earthquake
One afternoon, Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah embarks upon a journey in search of distant relatives. His immediate family are ruthless, rich and collaborate with colonial authorities. He hopes his long-lost relatives, who are unknown to the new Communist government, might be better placed to help him defraud it. Through a labyrinth of back alleys and memories, Boularwah makes his way from Algiers across the seven bridges of Constantine, battling the forces of a rapidly changing society while confronting the demons of his own past. The Earthquake offers a surrealist vision of post-colonial Algeria — a society in chaos, a world turned upside down. Written in the early 1970s, this classic work by pioneering novelist Tahir Wattar presciently foretells the dreadful events which would later besiege his country.
Black Book of Arabia
Discover a collection of short stories that will plunge you into the personal lives of a whole range of men and women - everyone from princesses to paupers and from sultans to sorcerers. You'll meet a princess whose best friend literally tries to steal her wedding, right down to her bridal shoes; a bride who mysteriously goes blind on her wedding day; a woman whose romantic Parisian honeymoon proves too good to be true; and a jealous wife who lures her husband into falling in love with another woman. These candid stories – sometimes moving, sometimes funny, and always entertaining and surprising – will resonate with readers round the world.
Egyptian Earth
A twelve-year old boy returns from school in Cairo to find his village torn by feuding and fear. A corrupt official has decreed that the peasants must irrigate their fields in five days instead of the customary ten – a demand that threatens to severely disrupt the life of this small community. It will take something extraordinary for the villagers to overcome the greedy ruling-class. The schoolmaster Sheikh Hassouna urges the villagers to stand together if they want to keep custody of the land they have lived on for generations. But it takes many attempts, some disastrous, others comical and touching, before they join forces against their oppressors. Egyptian Earth was first published in 1954, two years after the Egyptian revolution. An epic drama of great power, it is a masterpiece of modern Arabic literature.
Aeneid, Books VII-XII
The first six books of David Hadbawnik's astonishing modern translation of the Aeneid appeared from Shearsman Books in 2015. He now brings the whole project to a spectacular conclusion in a volume accompanied by Omar Al-Nakib's dramatic abstract illustrations. "Few narrative poems have possessed the Western imagination like Virgil's twelve-book epic written during Augustus's triumphant consolidation of the Roman Empire. [...] This new volume goes a long way toward moving the narrative into the hands of contemporary readers, drawing out a playful understanding of the ancient story while exhibiting modern preferences for poetic interaction and inquiry into the history and terms of poetic form ...
A Useless Man
With all the wit and brilliance of Chekhov, a distinctive collection of lyrical stories from Sait Faik Abasıyanık, “Turkey’s greatest short story writer” (The Guardian) Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s fiction traces the interior lives of strangers in his native Istanbul: ancient coffeehouse proprietors, priests, dream-addled fishermen, poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. The stories in A Useless Man are shaped by Sait Faik’s political autobiography – his resistance to social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the ethnic cleansing of his city – as he conjures the varied textures of life in Istanbul and its surrounding islands. The calm surface of these stories might seem to signal deference to the new Republic’s restrictions on language and culture, but Abasıyanık’s prose is crafted deceptively, with dark, subversive undercurrents. “Reading these stories by Sait Faik feels like finding the secret doors inside of poems,” Rivka Galchen wrote. Beautifully translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, A Useless Man is the most comprehensive collection of Sait Faik’s stories in English to date.
Tales From the Back Green
When these captivating Tales from the Back Green were broadcast on BBC Radio they were described by The Herald as 'a vividly engaging portrait of a vanished city' and The Scotsman as 'an engaging series fondly and wittily rendered'. Now published for the first time, actor Bill Paterson's stories brilliantly evoke his 1950s Glasgow boyhood. This is a world of intriguing characters and extraordinary events set against the background of the changes and challenges of the post-war era – the nuclear threat, the fading dominance of the kirk, Rock and Roll, the disappearance of the beloved trams, and why penny whoppers were not worth tuppence. As a young surveyor, Paterson was witness to the dramatic transformation of the city, as austere tenements were swept away to make way for new roads and high-rise blocks. Tales From the Back Green is a brilliant realisation of childhood and youth; of memories Paterson describes as 'suspended in amber like Jurassic Park's mosquito, with its DNA still intact.' He wonders whether our memories change from grey to gold as the years pass - do we naturally recall our childhood as a time of optimism and hope?
