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Granada
Radwa Ashour skillfully weaves a history of Granadan rule and an Arabic world into a novel that evokes cultural loss and the disappearance of a vanquished population. The novel follows the family of Abu Jaafar the bookbinder—his wife, widowed daughter-in-law, her two children, and his two apprentices—as they witness Christopher Columbus and his entourage in a triumphant parade featuring exotic plants, animals, human captives from the New World. Embedded in the narrative is the preparation for the marriage of Saad, one of the apprentices, and Saleema, Abu Jaafar's granddaughter—which is elegantly revealed in a number of parallel scenes. As the new rulers of Granada confiscate books and officials burn the collected volumes, Abu Jaafur quietly moves his rich library out of town. Persecuted Muslims fight to form an independent government, but increasing economic and cultural pressures on the Arabs of Spain and Christian rulers culminate in forcing Christian conversions and Muslim uprisings. A tale that is both vigorous and heartbreaking, this novel will appeal to general readers of Spanish and Arabic literature as well as anyone interested in Christian-Muslim relations.
Siraaj
Set in the late nineteenth century on a mythical island off the coast of Yemen, Radwa Ashour's Siraaj: An Arab Tale tells the poignant story of a mother and son as they are drawn inextricably into a revolt against their island's despotic sultan. Amina, a baker in the sultan's palace, anxiously awaits her son's return from a long voyage at sea, fearful that the sea has claimed Saïd just as it did his father and grandfather. Saïd, left behind in Alexandria by his ship as the British navy begins an attack on the city, slowly begins to make his way home, witnessing British colonial oppression along the way. Saïd's return brings Amina only a short-lived peace. The lessons he learned from the E...
Blue Lorries
Nada is no stranger to protest. She is five years old when her French mother takes her to visit her Egyptian father, a political activist with a passing resemblance to President Nasser, in prison. When he returns home five years later, a changed man, their little family begins to fracture and eventually Nada's mother moves back to Paris. Through her teenage years Nada is surrounded by the language of protest – 'anarchism', 'Trotskyism', 'communism' – and, one summer in Paris, she discovers the '68 movement and her first love. And how to slam doors in anger. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Through student sit-ins, imprisonments, passionate arguments, accidental alliances, fallen friends, joys and regrets, Nada's story grows into the story of Egypt's many celebrated activists such as Arwa and Siham. Moving, uplifting and deeply human, Radwa Ashour's masterpiece is the story of Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century and a paean to all those who choose a life of activism and quiet defiance.
The Journey
THIS TRANSLATION IS AN HOMAGE TO A GREAT LITERARY FIGURE AND TO THOSE MOVEMENTS WHICH CARRY ON HER LEGACY IN THEIR WORK Never neutral and deeply engaged in politics, literature, people’s struggles, and what she calls the “most urgent causes of our times,” a young Radwa Ashour charts her years as a student in the US of the 1970s, where she would become the first PhD student to graduate from the newly founded W.E.B Du Bois department of Afro-American Studies and the English Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975. A political progressive and leftist writer, critic, and activist, her memoir reflects not only on her own journey and struggles but those of the people s...
The Woman from Tantoura
The story of a young girl from her days in the village of Tantoura in Palestine up to the dawn of the new century --
Specters
Winner of the Cairo International Book Fair Prize. Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their work lives (one a professor of literature and the other of history), their married and unmarried lives, and their respective books. With her novel’s structure, Ashour pays tribute to the Arab qareen (double or companion, and sometimes demon) and the ancient Egyptian ka (the spirit that is born with and accompanies an individual through life and beyond).
Arab Women Writers
Arab women's writing in the modern age began with 'A'isha al-Taymuriya, Warda al-Yaziji, Zaynab Fawwaz, and other nineteenth-century pioneers in Egypt and the Levant. This unique study-first published in Arabic in 2004-looks at the work of those pioneers and then traces the development of Arab women's literature through the end of the twentieth century, and also includes a meticulously researched, comprehensive bibliography of writing by Arab women. In the first section, in nine essays that cover the Arab Middle East from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Yemen, critics and writers from the Arab world examine the origin and evolution of women's writing in each country in the region, addressing fi...
Spectres
Radwa and Shagar are two women born on the same day. Spectres alternates between their childhoods, their days at work, their married and unmarried lives, and the two books they are writing.
Scheherazade's Children
Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interp...
