Download or read book Reading Lolita in Tehran written by Azar Nafisi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2003-12-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire

Download or read book A Treaty of Love written by Samir El-Youssef and published by Halban Publishers. This book was released on 2019-01-12 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in six years, Ibrahim enjoys a breakfast of tomatoes, onions and pita bread, while his girlfriend Ruth takes a parcel to the local post office. As he waits for her return, he reflects on the events of the previous few days and then of the past few years. He is Palestinian, she Israeli and they live in London, a city they explore and grow to love. They delight in living against the political tide and in confounding people's assumptions. But, as the situation in the Middle East deteriorates, so it inevitably impinges on their life together and they struggle to maintain their relationship. It is the family secret that Ibrahim finally reveals that threatens to engulf them forever.

Download or read book Literary Modernity Between the Middle East and Europe written by Kamran Rastegar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comparative study of the development of English, Persian and Arabic literature and their interrelations with specific reference to modernity, nationalism and social value.

Download or read book Homesick written by Eshkol Nevo and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1995 and Noa and Amir have decided to move in together. Noa is studying photography in Jerusalem and Amir is a psychology student in Tel Aviv, so they choose a tiny flat in a village in the hills, between the two cities. Their flat is separated from that of their landlords, Sima and Moshe Zakian, by a thin wall, but on each side we find a different home - and a different world. Homesick is a beautiful, clever and moving story about history, love, family and the true meaning of home.

Download or read book Teaching the Literature of Today s Middle East written by Allen Webb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a gateway into the real literature emerging from the Middle East, this book shows teachers how to make the topic authentic, powerful, and relevant. Teaching the Literature of Today’s Middle East: • Introduces teachers to this literature and how to teach it • Brings to the reader a tremendous diversity of teachable texts and materials by Middle Eastern writers • Takes a thematic approach that allows students to understand and engage with the region and address key issues • Includes stories from the author’s own classroom, and shares student insight and reactions • Utilizes contemporary teaching methods, including cultural studies, literary circles, blogs, YouTube, class speakers, and film analysis • Directly and powerfully models how to address controversial issues in the region Written in an open, personal, and engaging style, theoretically informed and academically smart, highly relevant across the field of literacy education, this text offers teachers and teacher-educators a much needed resource for helping students to think deeply and critically about the politics and culture of the Middle East through literary engagements.

Download or read book Literatures of the Middle East written by Willis Barnstone and published by Pearson. This book was released on 2003 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text ... gathers together a ... selection of representative, authoritative writings - spanning antiquity to the present. It combines extensive introductions, headnotes, and bibliographies with ... literary translations of ... contemporary and classic writers.-Back cover. In addition to literary texts, [this book] includes selections from religious and philosophical texts that have literary merit, such as the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Gnostic and other intertestamental scriptures, and the Quran, as well as Sufi poems and teaching stories.-Pref.

Download or read book Specters of World Literature written by Mattar Karim Mattar and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of this book is a spectral theory of world literature that draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida and world-systems theory to assess how the field produces local literature as an "e;other"e; that haunts its universalising, assimilative imperative with the force of the uncanny. It takes the Middle Eastern novel as both metonym and metaphor of a spectral world literature. It explores the worlding of novels from the Middle East in recent years, and, focusing on the pivotal sites of Middle Eastern modernity (Egypt, Turkey, Iran), argues that lost to their global production, circulation and reception is their constitution in the logic of spectrality. With the intention of redressing this imbalance, it critically restores their engagements with the others of Middle Eastern modernity and shows, through a new reading of the Middle Eastern novel, that world literature is always-already haunted by its others, the ghosts of modernity.

Download or read book The Other Middle East written by Franck Salameh and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique literary collection offers a window on the contemporary Levant, a region comprising most of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, parts of southern Turkey and northwestern Iraq, and the Sinai Peninsula. Originally written in Arabic, French, Aramaic, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Hebrew, and reflecting an extraordinary diversity of cultures, faiths, traditions, and languages, the selections in this book also convey a wide range of ideas and perspectives, to offer readers a nuanced understanding of the mosaic that is the contemporary Middle East. Franck Salameh, who compiled this anthology over the course of more than two decades, introduces and annotates each selection for the benefit of the uninitiated reader, offering background on the various peoples and politics of the Levant. In these pages, we discover a Middle East in which, as one writer puts it, “an Armenian and a Turk can still hold hands in the midst of massacres.”

Download or read book Arabic Short Stories written by and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-12-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects twenty-four short stories by Arabic authors such as Bahaa Taher, Alifa Rifaat, and Edward El-Kharrat, which explore such themes as prostitution, adultery, and arranged marriage.

Download or read book Cockroach written by Rawi Hage and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described thief has just tried but failed to commit suicide. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but wilfully blind, citizens who surround him. In 2008, Cockroach was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. It won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, presented by the Quebec Writers' Federation.

Download or read book Beer in the Snooker Club written by Waguih Ghali and published by New Amsterdam Books. This book was released on 1999-11-02 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Waguih Ghali was raised in Cairo but spent much of his adult life studying and working in Europe. In Beer in the Snooker Club, Ghali chronicles the lives of Cairo's upper crust who, after the fall of King Farouk, are thoroughly unprepared to change its neo-feudal ways. Beer in the Snooker Club was the only book written by Ghali before his suicide in 1968. "Ghali's novel reproduces a cultural state of shock with great accuracy and great humor."–James Marcus of The Nation

Download or read book Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures written by Karima Laachir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study highlights the connections between power, cultural products, resistance, and the artistic strategies through which that resistance is voiced in the Middle East. Exploring cultural displays of dissent in the form of literary works, films, and music, the collection uses the concept of 'cultural resistance' to describe the way culture and cultural creations are used to resist or even change the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures either consciously or unconsciously. The contributors do not claim that these cultural products constitute organized resistance movements, but rather that they reflect instances of defiance that stem from their peculiar contexts. If culture can be used to consolidate and perpetuate power relations in societies, it can also be used as the site of resistance to oppression in its various forms: gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, subverting existing dominant social and political hegemonies in the Middle East.

Download or read book Honeymoon in Purdah written by Alison Wearing and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beautifully written travel memoir of a Western woman's journey in Iran Honeymoon in Purdah is a book of sketches gathered over the course of one woman's journey in Iran. Through her, we meet the ordinary and extraordinary people of Iran--men and women whose lives extend beyond Western news stories of kidnappings, terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism. Peppered with accounts of Iran's Islamic Revolution and political analyses of the country, Honeymoon in Purdah is a departure from our conventional perception of Iran. Alison Wearing give Iranians the chance to wander beyond headlines and stereotypes and in so doing, reveals the poetry of their lives.

Download or read book Great Literature of the Eastern World written by Ian Philip McGreal and published by HarperResource. This book was released on 1996 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The major works of prose, poetry and drama from China, India, Japan, Korea and the Middle East".

Download or read book Libyan Novel written by Olszok Charis Olszok and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysing prominent novelists such as Ibrahim al-Kuni and Hisham Matar, alongside lesser-known and emerging voices, this book introduces the themes and genres of the Libyan novel during the al-Qadhafi era. Exploring latent political protest and environmental lament in the writing of novelists in exile and in the Jamahiriyya, Charis Olszok focuses on the prominence of encounters between humans, animals and the land, the poetics of vulnerability that emerge from them, and the vision of humans as creatures (makhluqat) in which they are framed.

Download or read book The Urban Social History of the Middle East 1750 1950 written by Peter Sluglett and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-08 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great cities of the Middle East and North Africa have long attracted the attention and interest of historians. With the discovery and wider use over the last few decades of Islamic court records and Ottoman administrative documents, our knowledge of Middle Eastern cities between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries has vastly expanded. Drawing upon a treasure trove of documents and using a variety of methodologies, the contributors succeed in providing a significant overview of the ways in which Middle Eastern cities can be studied, as well as an excellent introduction to current literature in the field.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema written by Terri Ginsberg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To a substantial degree cinema has served to define the perceived character of the peoples and nations of the Middle East. This book covers the production and exhibition of the cinema of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabi, Yemen, Kuwait, and Bahrain, as well as the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, and the Jewish state of Israel. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on individual films, filmmakers, actors, significant historical figures, events, and concepts, and the countries themselves. It also covers the range of cinematic modes from documentary to fiction, representational to animation, generic to experimental, mainstream to avant-garde, and entertainment to propaganda. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Middle Eastern cinema.