Basrayatha

Basrayatha PDF Author: Muhammad Khudayyir
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789603811
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Basrayatha is a literary tribute by author Muhammad Khudayyir to the city of his birth, Basra, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in southern Iraq. Just as a city's inhabitants differ from outsiders through their knowledge of its streets and stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and the imagined city he created through stories, experiences, and folklore. By turns a memoir, a travelog, a love letter, and a meditation, Basrayatha summons up a city long gone, yet which lives on in the memories and imaginations of its people. In the tradition of Calvino and Borges, Khudayyir's mesmerizing work itself illuminates and enriches the story of this magnificent city.

Basrayatha

Basrayatha PDF Author: Muhammad Khudayyir
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789603811
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book

Book Description
Basrayatha is a literary tribute by author Muhammad Khudayyir to the city of his birth, Basra, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in southern Iraq. Just as a city's inhabitants differ from outsiders through their knowledge of its streets and stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and the imagined city he created through stories, experiences, and folklore. By turns a memoir, a travelog, a love letter, and a meditation, Basrayatha summons up a city long gone, yet which lives on in the memories and imaginations of its people. In the tradition of Calvino and Borges, Khudayyir's mesmerizing work itself illuminates and enriches the story of this magnificent city.

Basrayatha

Basrayatha PDF Author: Muḥammad Khuḍayr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789774166105
Category : Baṣrah (Iraq)
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description


Contemporary Iraqi Fiction

Contemporary Iraqi Fiction PDF Author: Shakir Mustafa
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815654456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
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.

Iraq's Modern Arabic Literature

Iraq's Modern Arabic Literature PDF Author: Salih J. Altoma
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810877061
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book covers 60 years of translations, studies, and other writings, which represent Iraq's national literature, including recent works of numerous Iraqi writers living in Western exile. By drawing attention to a largely overlooked but relevant and extensive literature accessible in English, it will serve as an invaluable guide to students of contemporary Iraq, modern Arabic literature and other fields such as women's studies, postcolonial studies, third world literature, American-Arab/Muslim Relations, and disapora studies.

The Last Chapter

The Last Chapter PDF Author: Laylá Abū Zayd
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774247750
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This thought-provoking, semi-autobiographical book tells the story of Aisha, a young Moroccan woman, and her struggle to find an identity in the Morocco of the second half of the twentieth century. Charting Aisha's path through adolescence and young adulthood up to the present, her story is told through a series of flashbacks, anecdotes, and glimpses of the past, all bound up with a strong, often strident, always compelling worldview that takes in Morocco, its politics, people, and traditions, Islam, and marriage. Male-female relationships feature strongly in the narrative, and by exposing us to Aisha's troubled romantic encounters, Abouzeid uncovers the shifting male/female roles within the Morocco of her lifetime. Many aspects of Moroccan society are also explored through the other clashes of the modern and the traditional in Aisha's life. The workplace and corruption, the struggle for women's rights, the clash between Islamic and Western values as well as with the older practices of sorcery and witchcraft, and the conflict between colonial and native language use are all intertwined in a narrative that is both forceful and often poetic. Through a series of tales of emotional disasters, the reader becomes aware not only of Aisha's frustrations but also of her deep commitment to her country and her struggle to defeat suffering, uphold justice, and retain a fierce independence as a woman and a clarity of conviction in her life. Leila Abouzeid is a pioneer among her Moroccan contemporaries in that she writes in Arabic rather than in French and is the first Moroccan woman writer of literature to be translated into English. This stimulating and revealing book adds a new perspective to Maghrebi women's writing, and is an important addition to the growing body of Arab women's writing in translation.

The Other Place

The Other Place PDF Author: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
ISBN: 1617974064
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The Other Place portrays the shallowness of the petrodollar culture and the price one pays for quick money. The protagonist of this prize-winning novel, an educated middle-class Egyptian from Alexandria, describes his experiences and those of migrant workers and professionals in one of the Gulf states, and their interaction with the oil-rich country's local elite and with agents of western businesses. The book pictures rather than states the desolation brought about when market values take over and the ravages that such an order causes to all who partake in it. Ibrahim Abdel Meguid succeeds in representing imaginatively the important phenomenon of migration and the barren landscape of the petrodollar culture, and at the same time penetrates the rationalizing mechanisms of the migrants and their psychological make-up. The Other Place was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996.

Chaos of the Senses

Chaos of the Senses PDF Author: Ahlam Mosteghanemi
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774160981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Ahlam Mosteghanemi's second novel picks up where Memory in the Flesh left off, with the story of love set in the battered and bruised Algeria of the1990s. Mosteghanemi takes her readers through the streets of suspicion and suspense, and the ups and downs of a forbidden love affair, through a story within a story, as a writer stuck in a loveless marriage to an important military man inadvertently writes what eventually comes true. She begins--after a period of not writing--by penning the narrative of a mysterious man who courts the object of his desire through deceptive words, then she helplessly follows the path of her fictitious character only to find that the mystery man exists and it is he who has led her to his door and into his life. One twist leads to the next, as the question remains of which man the writer was destined to meet and fall in love with--the mysterious artist or the doomed journalist. This lyrical adventure teases the reader with facts for fiction and fiction for facts. The backdrop of political chaos creates a sense of foreboding and fear for two powerless lovers. But where is reality and where is fantasy?

The Emergence of the Gulf States

The Emergence of the Gulf States PDF Author: J. E. Peterson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472587626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 The Emergence of the Gulf States covers the history of the Gulf from the 18th century to the late 20th century. Employing a broad perspective, the volume brings together experts in the field to consider the region's political, economic and social development. The contributions address key themes including the impact of early history, religious movements, social structures, identity and language, imperialism, 20th-century economic transformation and relations with the wider Indian Ocean and Arab world. The work as a whole provides a new interpretive approach based on new research coupled with extensive reviews of the relevant literature. It offers a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the area and sets a new standard for the future scholarship and understanding of this vital region.

The Dreams of Departure

The Dreams of Departure PDF Author: Najīb Maḥfūẓ
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774160677
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Short stories.

La Momie de la Momification

La Momie de la Momification PDF Author: Jamāl Ghīṭānī
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774160516
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
With its Sufistic parables of the human condition, rendered in a style redolent of both the austere meditations of Borges and the dark engorged ruminations of Arthur C. Clark, Pyramid Texts engages the mind and beguiles the imagination. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last so that, like their subjects, they taper ultimately into nothingness the author evokes the obsessions that have drawn men over the centuries to the brooding presence of mankind's most ancient and mysterious monuments. Among others in a procession of exotic characters, a Moroccan seeker after knowledge spends years contemplating the pyramids in the hope that one day he will understand the mysterious writing that fitfully appears on their sides. Another waits patiently for the moment when the shadow of one will diverge from its accustomed path and bestow immortality, and the Sphinx performs a celestial dance. Pyramid Texts leads us into a world of endless passages and mysterious sighing winds, a world whose claustrophobic and shadowy spaces may be illuminated by flashes of ecstasy leading to scintillating transfigurations and dizzying annihilations.