Download or read book An Arab Melancholia written by Abdellah Taïa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

Download or read book In the Country of Others written by Leila Slimani and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling new novel by the author of The Perfect Nanny that “lays bare women’s intimate, lacerating experience of war” (The New York Times Book Review) After World War II, Mathilde leaves France for Morocco to be with her husband, whom she met while he was fighting for the French army. A spirited young woman, she now finds herself a farmer’s wife, her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. But she refuses to be subjugated or confined to her role as mother of a growing family. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Mathilde’s fierce desire for autonomy parallels her adopted country’s fight for independence in this lush and transporting novel about race, resilience, and women’s empowerment.

Download or read book The Simple Past written by Driss Chraibi and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Simple Past came out in 1954, and both in France and its author’s native Morocco the book caused an explosion of fury. The protagonist, who shares the author’s name, Driss, comes from a Moroccan family of means, his father a self-made tea merchant, the most devout of Muslims, quick to be provoked and ready to lash out verbally or physically, continually bent on subduing his timid wife and many children to his iron and ever-righteous will. He is known, simply, as the Lord, and Driss, who is in high school, is in full revolt against both him and the French colonial authorities, for whom, as much as for his father, he is no one. Driss Chraïbi’s classic coming-of-age story is about colonialism, Islam, the subjection of women, and finding, as his novel does, a voice that is as cutting and coruscating as it is original and free.

Download or read book Marrakech Noir written by Fouad Laroui and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique anthology of crime fiction features 15 original stories of “scandals, smugglers, and other sordid tales” by award-winning Moroccan authors (CrimeReads). At first glance, Marrakech may seem like an odd setting for noir fiction. Contemporary Moroccans call it The Joyful City—a place where locals are happy to joke about gossip and quick to forget stories of crime. But in Marrakech Noir, some of Morocco’s finest authors address old wrong that have been kept hidden behind the city’s ancient gates, and spin contemporary tales of poverty, grift, and violence in this global tourist destination. Marrakech Noir features brand-new stories by Fouad Laroui, Allal Bourqia, Abdelkader Benali, Mohamed Zouhair, Mohamed Achaari, Hanane Derkaoui, Fatiha Morchid, Mahi Binebine, Mohamed Nedali, Halima Zine El Abidine, My Seddik Rabbaj, Yassin Adnan, Karima Nadir, Taha Adnan, and Lahcen Bakour.

Download or read book Infidels written by Abdellah Taïa and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Salé, Morocco—the hometown Abdellah Taïa fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films—Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor—"a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone. In sex. Beyond sex." As a ten-year-old sidekick to his mother, Jallal spits in the face of her enemies both real and imagined. The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.

Download or read book The Curious Case of Dassoukine s Trousers written by Fouad Laroui and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning English-language debut by Morocco's most prominent contemporary author, a linked story collection exploring what it means to be foreign.

Download or read book Lords of the Atlas written by Gavin Maxwell and published by Eland & Sickle Moon Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the extraordinary story of a feudal fiefdom in southern Morocco in the early twentieth century.

Download or read book Another Morocco written by Abdellah Taïa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of life in North Africa that flirt with strategies of revelation and concealment, by the first openly gay writer to be published in Morocco. Tangier is a possessed city, haunted by spirits of different faiths. When we have literature in our blood, in our souls, it's impossible not to be visited by them. —from Another Morocco In 2006, Abdellah Taïa returned to his native Morocco to promote the Moroccan release of his second book, Le rouge du tarbouche (The Red of the Fez). During this book tour, he was interviewed by a reporter for the French-Arab journal Tel Quel, who was intrigued by the themes of homosexuality she saw in his writing. Taïa, who had not publically come out and feared the repercussions for himself and his family of doing so in a country where homosexuality continues to be outlawed, nevertheless consented to the interview and subsequent profile, “Homosexuel envers et contre tous” (“Homosexual against All Odds”). This interview made him the first openly gay writer to be published in Morocco. Another Morocco collects short stories from Taïa's first two books, Mon Maroc (My Morocco) and Le rouge du tarbouche, both published before this pivotal moment. In these stories, we see a young writer testing the porousness of boundaries, flirting with strategies of revelation and concealment. These are tales of life in a working-class Moroccan family, of a maturing writer's fraught relationship with language and community, and of the many cities and works that have inspired him. With a reverence for the subaltern—for the strength of women and the disenfranchised—these stories speak of humanity and the construction of the self against forces that would invalidate its very existence. Taïa's work is, necessarily, a political gesture.

Download or read book A Country for Dying written by Abdellah Taïa and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exquisite novel of North Africans in Paris by "one of the most original and necessary voices in world literature" WINNER OF THE 2021 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE Paris, Summer 2010. Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her. Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona. Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira. Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Taïa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future."

Download or read book Year of the Elephant written by Barbara Parmenter and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes glossary and interview with the author.

Download or read book Amazir written by Tom Gamble and published by Beautiful Books Limited. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An idealistic young Englishman, Harry Summerfield, befriends an American oil explorer in Gibraltar in the 1930s. Their meeting sparks a journey for both men that will take them across Morocco and northern Africa, to encounter the harsh realities of Berber opposition to French colonial rule and the passion and conflict of a love for the same young French woman. Full of action, character and extraordinarily vivid local colour, this is a vast novel of adventure, romance and intrigue which keeps the reader guessing page after page. From the hustle and bustle of Marrakech to the beautiful solitude of the Atlas Mountains, and incorporating all levels of society in pre-war Morocco (from Berber tribesmen to French politicians), Amazir is a powerfully evocative work dealing with a vast spectrum of human experience from wonder to despair. Revisiting the traditional epic-style novel format, Tom Gamble's Amazir is a breathtaking journey into the souks and mountains of Morocco that chronicles a powerful love affair and a nation s political turmoil.

Download or read book Two Novellas by YAE written by Youssouf Amine Elalamy and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his 18-year reign as premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis dominated the province and shaped it to his image. A brilliant orator and a scathing wit, Duplessis exercised complete control over his caucus and the Cabinet. If he couldn t get a vote, he bought it. Politics was the fuel that drove his life. He died on the job.

Download or read book France Spain and the Rif written by Walter Harris and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: L'action politico-militaire de l'Espagne et de la France dans le Rif, racontée par le correspondant du Times au Maroc.

Download or read book The French Intifada written by Andrew Hussey and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the affluent centre of Paris and other French cities, in the deprived banlieues, a war is going on. This is the French Intifada, a guerrilla war between the French state and the former subjects of its Empire, for whom the mantra of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' conceals a bitter history of domination, oppression, and brutality. This war began in the early 1800s, with Napoleon's lust for martial adventure, strategic power and imperial preeminence, and led to the armed colonization of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and decades of bloody conflict, all in the name of 'civilization'. Here, against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Andrew Hussey walks the front lines of this war - from the Gare du Nord in Paris to the souks of Marrakesh and the mosques of Tangier - to tell the strange and complex story of the relationship between secular, republican France and the Muslim world of North Africa. The result is a completely new portrait of an old nation. Combining a fascinating and compulsively readable mix of history, politics and literature with Hussey's years of personal experience travelling across the Arab World, The French Intifada reveals the role played by the countries of the Maghreb in shaping French history, and explores the challenge being mounted by today's dispossessed heirs to the colonial project: a challenge that is angrily and violently staking a claim on France's future.

Download or read book In the Country of Others written by Leila Slimani and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling new novel by the author of The Perfect Nanny that “lays bare women’s intimate, lacerating experience of war” (The New York Times Book Review) After World War II, Mathilde leaves France for Morocco to be with her husband, whom she met while he was fighting for the French army. A spirited young woman, she now finds herself a farmer’s wife, her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. But she refuses to be subjugated or confined to her role as mother of a growing family. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Mathilde’s fierce desire for autonomy parallels her adopted country’s fight for independence in this lush and transporting novel about race, resilience, and women’s empowerment.

Download or read book Queer Maghrebi French written by Denis M Provencher and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queer Maghrebi French investigates the lives and stories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French men who moved to or grew up in contemporary France and how these queer men living in France and the diaspora stake claims to time and space, construct kinship, and imagine their own future.

Download or read book Sex and Lies written by Leïla Slimani and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Striking' ELLE France 'Brave' iNews 'Powerful' TLS 'Urgent' Evening Standard 'Original' Cosmopolitan The first work of non-fiction in English from the prize-winning and internationally bestselling author of Lullaby and Adèle, translated by Sophie Lewis. In these essays, Leïla Slimani gives voice to young Moroccan women who are grappling with a conservative Arab culture that at once condemns and commodifies sex. In a country where the law punishes and outlaws all forms of sex outside marriage, as well as homosexuality and prostitution, women have only two options for their sexual identities: virgin or wife. Sex and Lies is an essential confrontation with Morocco's intimate demons and a vibrant appeal for the universal freedom to be, to love and to desire.