Dancing Arabs

Dancing Arabs PDF Author: Sayed Kashua
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 1555846610
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
In this “slyly subversive, semi-autobiographical” novel “of Arab Israeli life,” a Palestinian man struggles against the strict confines of identity (Publishers Weekly). In Sayed Kashua’s debut novel, a nameless anti-hero contends with the legacy of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When the narrator is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools, and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs is a “chilling, convincing tale” of one man’s struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both (Publishers Weekly). “Rings out on every page with a compelling sense of human truth” —Kirkus Reviews “Despite its dark prognosis, there is a lightness and dry humor that lifts it with the kind of wings its protagonist once hoped for.” —Booklist

Dancing Arabs

Dancing Arabs PDF Author: Sayed Kashua
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 1555846610
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book

Book Description
In this “slyly subversive, semi-autobiographical” novel “of Arab Israeli life,” a Palestinian man struggles against the strict confines of identity (Publishers Weekly). In Sayed Kashua’s debut novel, a nameless anti-hero contends with the legacy of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When the narrator is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools, and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs is a “chilling, convincing tale” of one man’s struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both (Publishers Weekly). “Rings out on every page with a compelling sense of human truth” —Kirkus Reviews “Despite its dark prognosis, there is a lightness and dry humor that lifts it with the kind of wings its protagonist once hoped for.” —Booklist

Native

Native PDF Author: Sayed Kashua
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802190189
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Essays by “Jerusalem’s version of Charles Bukowski . . . Just as aware and critical—of his city, his family, Israel, the Arabs, but most of all of himself” (NPR). Sayed Kashua has been praised by the New York Times as “a master of subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society.” An Arab-Israeli who lived in Jerusalem for most of his life, Kashua started writing with the hope of creating one story that both Palestinians and Israelis could relate to, rather than two that cannot coexist together. He devoted his novels and his satirical weekly column published in Haaretz to telling the Palestinian story and exploring the contradictions of modern Israel, while also capturing the nuances of everyday family life in all its tenderness and chaos. With an intimate tone fueled by deep-seated apprehension and razor-sharp ironic wit, Kashua has been documenting his own life as well as that of society at large: he writes about his children’s upbringing and encounters with racism, about fatherhood and married life, the Jewish-Arab conflict, his professional ambitions, travels around the world as an author, and—more than anything—his love of books and literature. He brings forth a series of brilliant, caustic, wry, and fearless reflections on social and cultural dynamics as experienced by someone who straddles two societies. “One of the most celebrated satirists in Hebrew literature . . . [Kashua] has an acerbic, dry wit and a talent for turning everyday events into apocalyptic scenarios.”—Philadelphia Inquirer “What is most striking in these columns is the universality of what it means to be a father, husband and man.”—Toronto Star

Second Person Singular

Second Person Singular PDF Author: Sayed Kashua
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194648
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
An award-winning novel of love, betrayal, and Arab Israeli identity by the author of Dancing Arabs—“one of the most important contemporary Hebrew writers” (Haaretz). A successful Arab criminal attorney and a social worker-turned-artist find their lives intersecting under the most curious of circumstances. The lawyer has a thriving practice in Jerusalem, a large house, and a Mercedes. He speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, and lives with his wife and two young children. To maintain his image as a sophisticated Israeli Arab, he makes frequent visits to a local bookstore and picks up popular novels. But on one fateful evening, he decides to buy a used copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, a book his wife once recommended. Tucked in its pages, he finds a love letter, in Arabic . . . in his wife’s handwriting. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, he decides to hunt down the book’s previous owner—a man named Yonatan. But Yonatan’s identity is more complex than the attorney imagined. In the process of dredging up old ghosts and secrets, the lawyer breaks the fragile threads that hold all of their lives together. Winner of the 2011 Bernstein Prize, Second Person Singular is “part comedy of manners, part psychological mystery” (The Boston Globe) that offers “sharp insights on the assumptions made about race, religion, ethnicity, and class that shape Israeli identity” (Publishers Weekly). “[Kashua’s] dry wit shines.” —Los Angeles Times “Kashua’s protagonists struggle, often comically . . . making his narratives more nuanced than some of the other Arabs writing about the conflict” —Newsweek “Sayed Kashua is a brilliant, funny, humane writer who effortlessly overturns any and all preconceptions about the Middle East. God, I love him.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

Track Changes

Track Changes PDF Author: Sayed Kashua
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802147909
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
An Arab Israeli man, back in Jerusalem to see his estranged father, narrates “a novel about just how sad, fractured and tricky cultural identity can get” (Seattle Times). Having emigrated to America years before, a nameless memoirist now residing in Illinois receives word that his estranged father, whom he has not spoken to in fourteen years, is dying. Leaving his wife and their three children, he returns to Jerusalem and to his hometown of Tira in Palestine to be by his family’s side. But few are happy to see him back and, geographically and emotionally displaced, he feels more alienated from his life than ever. Sitting by his father’s hospital bed, the memoirist begins to remember long-buried traumas, the root causes of his fallout with his family, the catalyst for his marriage and its recent dissolution, and his strained relationships with his children—all of which is strangely linked to a short story he published years ago about a young girl named Palestine. As he plunges deeper into his memory and recounts the history of his land and his love, the lines between truth and lies, fact and fiction become increasingly blurred. Hailed as “an unusually gifted storyteller with exceptional insight” (Jewish Tribune), Bernstein Award–winning writer Sayed Kashua presents a masterful novel about the stories Palestinians and Israelis tell themselves about their lives and their histories.

Arabian Jazz

Arabian Jazz PDF Author: Diana Abu-Jaber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393324228
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Balances are struck in this luminous first novel-between two radically distinct cultures, between obligation and self-will, between past and future, between hilarity and heartbreak-as the Jordanian family of Matussem Ramoud settles in a small, poor-white community in upstate New York.

Let It Be Morning

Let It Be Morning PDF Author: Sayed Kashua
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 1555846629
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Now a major motion picture from award–winning director Eran Kolirin: A “disturbing and powerfully accomplished novel” of conflicting allegiances among Arab Israelis from the acclaimed author of Dancing Arabs (The Guardian). A young Arab journalist returns to his hometown—an Arab village in Israel’s borderland near the West Bank. There, his conflicted sense of belonging is forced into crisis when the village becomes a pawn in the endless power struggle that is the Middle East. Hoping to reclaim the simplicity of life among his kin, the prodigal son returns home to find that nothing is as he remembers: everything is smaller, the people are petty and provincial. But when Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, paranoia takes hold and the village community devolves into chaos. In Let It Be Morning, Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua once again “relates the experience of those caught in the middle, the Arab-Israelis who are citizens but are separated from many of their countrymen by faith and heritage” (School Library Journal). “Kashua . . . writes about the Israeli Arabs’ balancing act with knowledge and passion.” —Publishers Weekly

The Good Arabs

The Good Arabs PDF Author: Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781999058890
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, family both biological and chosen, and community. In mapping Arab and trans identity through the remnants of trauma, the garbage crisis in Lebanon, the ways countries let down their citizens, and the immensity of experience felt in one body, the genre-defying collection The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.

Desiring Arabs

Desiring Arabs PDF Author: Joseph A. Massad
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226509605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture. “A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report “In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times

Reel Bad Arabs

Reel Bad Arabs PDF Author: Jack G. Shaheen
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
ISBN: 1623710065
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
A groundbreaking book that dissects a slanderous history dating from cinema’s earliest days to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters that feature machine-gun wielding and bomb-blowing "evil" Arabs Award-winning film authority Jack G. Shaheen, noting that only Native Americans have been more relentlessly smeared on the silver screen, painstakingly makes his case that "Arab" has remained Hollywood’s shameless shorthand for "bad guy," long after the movie industry has shifted its portrayal of other minority groups. In this comprehensive study of over one thousand films, arranged alphabetically in such chapters as "Villains," "Sheikhs," "Cameos," and "Cliffhangers," Shaheen documents the tendency to portray Muslim Arabs as Public Enemy #1—brutal, heartless, uncivilized Others bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners. Shaheen examines how and why such a stereotype has grown and spread in the film industry and what may be done to change Hollywood’s defamation of Arabs.

Dancing Arabs

Dancing Arabs PDF Author: Sayed Kashua
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9781417723102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The debut novel by twenty-eight-year-old Arab-Israeli Sayed Kashua has been praised around the world for its honesty, irony, humor, and its uniquely human portrayal of a young man who moves between two societies, becoming a stranger to both. Kashua's nameless antihero has big shoes to fill, having grown up with the myth of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and with a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When he is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs brilliantly maps one man's struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both.