Bøger i Middle East Literature In Translation serien

Hadiya Hussein's poignant 2017 novel plunges readers into a haunting and powerful story of resilience. Set at the end of Saddam Hussein's brutal reign, the novel follows Narjis, a young Iraqi woman, on her quest to discover what has become of the man she loves. Yusef, suspected by the regime of being a dissident, has disappeared-presumably either imprisoned or executed. On her journey, Narjis receives shelter from a Kurdish family who welcome her into their home where she meets Umm Hani, an older woman who is searching for her long-lost son. Together they form a bond, and Narjis comes to understand the depth of loss and grief of those around her. At the same time, she is introduced to the warm hospitality of the Kurdish community, settling into their everyday lives, and embracing their customs. Barbara Romaine's translation skillfully renders this complex, layered story, giving readers a stark yet beautiful portrait of contemporary Iraq.

Twenty-six-year-old college graduate, artist, and employee of the Ministry of Art and Culture, Hasti Nourian aspires to be a "e;new woman"e;-independent-minded, strong-willed, and in control of her own destiny. A destiny that includes Morad, an idealistic young architect and artist with whom Hasti is deeply in love. Morad is a sharp critic of Iran's Westernized bourgeois class, the one that Hasti's mother relishes. After Hasti's father died, her mother had married a wealthy businessman and moved to an exclusive neighborhood of northern Tehran.Socializing with a mixed group of Americans, English-speaking Iranians, and British expats, her mother's life revolves around gym visits, hairdressers, and party planning. When her mother persuades Hasti to join her at the spa, she introduces her to Salim, an eligible young man from a wealthy family whose British education and proper comportment, as well as his economic status, make him an ideal suitor for Hasti in her mother's eyes. Against her better judgment, Hasti finds herself attracted to Salim and tempted by her mother's comfortable lifestyle. As the novel unfolds, Hasti is torn between her first love and the radical politics of her university friends, and her love for her mother and the freedom economic security can bring. Set in Tehran in the mid-1970s, just a few years before the 1977-79 revolution, Daneshvar's unforgettable novel depicts the tumultuous social, cultural, and economic changes of the day through the intimate story of a young woman's struggle to find her identity.

Each story in Mohamed Makhzangi's unique collection Animals in Our Days features a different animal species and its fraught relationship with humans-water buffalo in a rural village gone mad from electric lights, brass grasshoppers purchased in a crowded Bangkok market, or ghostly rabbits that haunt the site of a long-ago brutal military crackdown. Other stories tell of bear-trainers in India and of the American invasion of Iraq as experienced by a foal, deer, and puppies.Originally published in 2006, Makhzangi's stories are part of a long tradition of writings on animals in Arabic literature. In this collection, animals offer a mute testament to the brutality and callousness of humanity, particularly when modernity sunders humans from the natural environment. Makhzangi is one of Egypt's most perceptive and nuanced authors, merging a writer's empathy with a scientist's curiosity about the world.Like Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, or J. M. Coetzee's Lives of Animals, Makhzangi's stories trace the numinous, almost supernatural, connections between our species and others. In these resonant, haunting tales, Animals in Our Days foregrounds our urgent need to reacquire the sense of awe, humility, and respect that once characterized our relationship with animals.

In Hassouna Mosbahi's engrossing and keenly observed novel, he takes readers deep into one day in the life of Yunus, a Tunisian intellectual. A professor of French language and Flaubert specialist, Yunis is recently retired and separated from his wife, as he leaves the city to settle in the Tunisian coastal city of Nabeul. Searching for solitude, he hopes to spend the remainder of his life among the books he loves. On the day of his sixtieth birthday, Yunus plunges into a delayed midlife crisis as he reflects on the major moments in his life, from taking up writing as a young man to his career as a university professor to his failed marriage. Yunus's identity crisis mirrors that of his Tunisian homeland with its tumultuous history of political and cultural upheaval. He meditates on the lives of his friends, drawing from his memory a colorful cast of characters whose experiences reflect the outsized influence of religion and tradition in their lives. Through the eyes of Yunus, Mosbahi's elegiac, literary novel explores life and death, love and writing, and the relationship between puritanism and extremism in the Arab world today.

This monumental family saga offers a vivid portrait of Egypt's Mamluk period, one that is at both sweeping in scope and intimate in detail. Set in medieval Cairo, the novel centers on three generations of Egyptians, foreign-born Mamluks, and their descendants as their trials and victories mirror those of their turbulent country. The first volume, "e;Sons of the People"e;, introduces us to Zaynab, the daughter of a middle-class merchant in Cairo who catches the eye of the powerful Mamluk amir Muhammad. After they marry, Zaynab is transported to the foreign world of Mamluk politics and wealth where she must navigate the complicated machinations of various rulers and raise their four children. Their oldest son becomes an architect and embarks upon the monumental task of building a grand mosque with Sultan Hasan as a symbol of the Mamluks rise to power. In the second volume "e;The Judge of Qus"e;, Bassiouney tells the story of Amr ibn Ahmad ibn Abd al-Karim, a wise and compassionate judge of Islamic law whose refusal to bend to the demands of the Mamluk rulers ultimately leads to Amr's downfall. The final volume, "e;Events of Nights,"e; weaves together testimonies from three characters, each with narrow and differing perspectives on the novel's events, subtly calling the readers' attention to the unstable nature of historical fiction. Filled with compelling drama, ruthless ambition, and tragic love, Bassiouney's masterful trilogy brings the Mamluk's rich cultural and architectural heritage to life through the eyes of one family.

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 "e;Calendars"e; 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.

The carefully crafted, subtle, and humorous stories in Packaged Lives show Zangana at her best as a fiction writer. She portrays her subjects keenly, sensitively, and lovingly but without compromise. Iraqis living in exile come to life in her narratives as men and women who are caught between two worlds.

With an infectious blend of humour, satire, and biting social commentary, Yassin Adnan gives readers a portrait of contemporary Morocco - and the city of Marrakech - told through the eyes of the hapless Rahhal Laaouina, a.k.a. the Squirrel.

In Pezeshkzad's fictional account, Hafez's life in fourteenth-century Shiraz is a mix of peril and humour. Set in a city that is at once beautiful and cutthroat, the novel includes a cast of historical figures to illuminate this elusive poet of the Persian literary tradition.

When celebrated mahjar writer Ameen Rihani returned to his native Lebanon from his long stay in New York, he set out on nine journeys through the Lebanese countryside, from the rising mountains to the shores of the Mediterranean, to experience and document the land in intimate detail.

Shahrokh Meskoob was one of Iran's leading intellectuals and a preeminent scholar of Persian literary traditions, language, and cultural identity. In The Ant's Gift, Meskoob applies his insight and considerable analytical skills to the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran completed in 1010 by the poet Abul-Qusem Ferdowsi.

Undertaking a sustained interpretation of Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih's novels and short stories, this study focuses primarily on the ways in which his work depicts the clashing of Arab ideologies - that is, questions of tradition, modernity, imperialism, gender and political authority.

Set in late nineteenth-century Benghazi, Najwa Bin Shatwan's powerful novel tells the story of Atiqa, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master. Shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Ficiton, Bin Shatwan's unforgettable novel offers a window into a dark chapter of Libyan history.

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.

From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England.

Considered one of Morocco's most important contemporary writers, Muhammad Zafzaf created stories of alterity, compassionate tales inhabited by prostitutes, thieves, and addicts living in the margins of society. In The Elusive Fox, Zafzaf's first novel to be translated into English, a young teacher visits the coastal city of Essaouira in the 1960s. There he meets a group of European bohemians and local Moroccans and is exposed to the grittier side of society.More than a novel, The Elusive Fox is a portrait of a city during a time of fluidcultural and political mores in Morocco.

Vividly captures the experiences of prominent Indian intellectual and scholar Shibli- Nu'ma-ni- (1857-1914) as he journeyed across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1892. A professor of Arabic and Persian, Nu'ma-ni- took a six-month leave from teaching to travel to the Ottoman Empire in search of rare printed works and manuscripts.

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem's powerfully imaginative novel. Antoon's translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.

Shortlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize, this novel traces the turbulent life of Aisha, an Egyptian girl raised in a Christian convent. Part allegory, part magical realism, the novel is threaded with aspects of Egyptian antiquity, including accounts of the excavations of ancient Egyptian relics and the tortured jealousies that accompanied them.

Shahrokh Meskoob is one of the first scholars to take an innovative approach to Hafez's poetry. Meskoob goes beyond a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of Hafez's poetry in the Divan to access the interior thoughts of the poet and summon his spirit in the process of understanding Hafez's mysticism.

Nostalgically commemorates the lost culture of an ancient Iraqi Jewish minority living amidst a majority Muslim population in 1940s Baghdad. The plot unfolds during a time of great turmoil and events profoundly affected Muslim-Jewish relationships.

By turns bleak, nostalgic, and lighthearted, Jerusalem Stands Alone explores the interconnected lives of its mostly Palestinian cast. The stories, entwined around themes of family and identity, diverge in viewpoint and chronology but ultimately unite to reveal the tapestry of Palestinian Jerusalem.

"First published a Le Daesert, ou la Vie et les Aventures de Jubair Ouali El-Mammi, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1977, 1989."--Title page verso.

This tender memoir chronicles the early years of Sayyid Qutb, one of Egypt's most influential radical Islamist thinkers and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is one of the most masterful, psychologically penetrating novels in Armenian diaspora literature. Published in 1967 at a time of political awakening among the descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide, the novel explores themes of trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation, friendship, and sacrifice, and examines the relationship between victim and perpetrator.

In this luminous bilingual collection of poems, Ghareeb Iskander offers a personal response to the The Epic of Gilgamesh. Iskander's modern-day Gilgamesh is a nameless Iraqi citizen who witnessed the fall of the dictatorship, who exists in a constant state of threat, and who dreams, not about eternity, but simply about life.

Ahmet Midhat Efendi's famous 1875 novel Felatun Bey and Rakim Efendi takes place in late nineteenth-century Istanbul and follows the lives of two young men who come from radically different backgrounds. The novel provides readers with an elegant yet powerful appeal for progressive reforms and individual freedoms.

This award-winning collection of seventy-eight pieces of flash fiction presents an intense and powerful vision of today's world seen through the eyes of an alienated and sardonic author. The Perception of Meaning reads like an alternative history to our world - a collage of small nightmares brought to life by a canon of unlikely historical figures.