Download or read book Basrayatha portrait of a city written by Muḥammad Khuḍayr and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basrayatha is a literary tribute by author Mohammed 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 as well as its stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and Basrayatha, the imagined city he has created through stories, experiences, and folklore. By turns a memoir, a travelogue, a love letter, and a meditation, Basrayatha summons up images of a city long gone. In loving detail, Khudayyir recounts his discovery of his city as a child, as well as past communal banquets, the public baths, the delights of the Muslim day of rest, the city's flea markets and those who frequent them, a country bumpkin's big day in the city, Hollywood films at the local cinema, daily life during the Iran Iraq War, and the canals and rivers around Basra. Above all, however, the book illuminates the role of the storyteller in creating the cities we inhabit. Evoking the literary modernism of authors like Calvino and Borges, and tinged with nostalgia for a city now disappeared, Basrayatha is a masterful tribute to the power of memory and imagination.
Download or read book Basrayatha written by Mohammed Khudayyir and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007-03-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basrayatha is a literary tribute by author Mohammed 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 as well as its stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real city of Basra and Basrayatha, the imagined city he has created through stories, experiences, and folklore. By turns a memoir, a travelogue, a love letter, and a meditation, Basrayatha summons up images of a city long gone. In loving detail, Khudayyir recounts his discovery of his city as a child, as well as past communal banquets, the public baths, the delights of the Muslim day of rest, the city’s flea markets and those who frequent them, a country bumpkin’s big day in the city, Hollywood films at the local cinema, daily life during the Iran–Iraq War, and the canals and rivers around Basra. Above all, however, the book illuminates the role of the storyteller in creating the cities we inhabit. Evoking the literary modernism of authors like Calvino and Borges, and tinged with nostalgia for a city now disappeared, Basrayatha is a masterful tribute to the power of memory and imagination.
Download or read book Contemporary Iraqi Fiction written by Shakir Mustafa and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-31 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Basrayatha written by Muhammad Khudayyir and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Iraq s Modern Arabic Literature written by Salih J. Altoma and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2010-10-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering 60 years of materials, this bibliography cites translations, studies, and other writings, which represent Iraq's national literature, including recent works of numerous Iraqi writers living in Western exile. The volume serves as a guide to three interrelated data: o Translations that have appeared since 1950, as books or as individual items (poems, short stories, novel extracts, plays, diaries) in print-and non-print publications in Iraq and other Arab and English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. o Relevant studies and other secondary sources including selected reviews and author interviews, which cover Iraqi literature and writers. o The scope of displacement or dispersion of Iraqi writers, artists, and other intellectuals who have been uprooted and are now living in exile in Arab or other Western countries. By drawing attention to a largely overlooked but relevant and extensive literature accessible in English, this first of its kind book 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 Diaspora studies.
Download or read book Maryams Maze written by Mansoura Ez-Eldin and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maryam's Maze is an enigmatic novel by one of the most promising authors of a vibrant new generation of Egyptian writers. Set in the house of Yusuf el Tagi, Maryam's Maze relates the story of a woman struggling to find her way through the confusion of the world around her. Using the literary device of the 'double,' Maryam's Maze narrates a story that on one level touches on universal human emotions. At the same time the inner maze of dreams and memories in which the young Maryam finds herself stirs greater resonance in issues of modern Egyptian life. Echoing themes found in her earlier short fiction, Mansoura Ez Eldin has woven a haunting allegorical tale that reveals its real meaning to the reader only at the end of the novel. With its precision of language and distinctive personal vision, Maryam's Maze represents a unique contribution to the corpus of contemporary Egyptian fiction.
Download or read book No One Sleeps in Alexandria written by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2006-04-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping novel depicts the intertwined lives of an assortment of Egyptians--Muslims and Copts, northerners and southerners, men and women--as they begin to settle in Egypt's great second city, and explores how the Second World War, starting in supposedly faraway Europe, comes crashing down on them, affecting their lives in fateful ways. Central to the novel is the story of a striking friendship between Sheikh Magd al-Din, a devout Muslim with peasant roots in northern Egypt, and Dimyan, a Copt with roots in southern Egypt, in their journey of survival and self-discovery. Woven around this narrative are the stories of other characters, in the city, in the villages, or in the faraway desert, closer to the fields of combat. And then there is the story of Alexandria itself, as written by history, as experienced by its denizens, and as touched by the war. Throughout, the author captures the cadences of everyday life in the Alexandria of the early 1940s, and boldly explores the often delicate question of religious differences in depth and on more than one level. No One Sleeps in Alexandria adds an authentically Egyptian vision of Alexandria to the many literary--but mainly Western--Alexandrias we know already: it may be the same space in which Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell move but it is certainly not the same world.
Download or read book The Last Chapter written by Laylá Abū Zayd and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Other Place written by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Collar and the Bracelet written by Yahya Taher Abdullah and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the ancient Upper Egyptian village of Karnak against the backdrop of the British campaigns in Sudan, the Second World War, and the war in Palestine, The Collar and the Bracelet is the stunning saga of the Bishari family a family ripped apart by the violence of history, the dark conduits of human desire, and the rigid social conventions of village life. In a series of masterful narrative circles and repetitions, the novella traces the grim intrigues of Hazina al-Bishari and the inexorable destinies of her son, the exile and notorious bandit Mustafa, her daughter Fahima, tortured by guilt and secret passion, and the tragic doom of her beautiful granddaughter Nabawiya. Yahya Taher Abdullah's haunting prose distills the rhythmic lyricism of the folk story and weaves it into a uniquely modernist narrative tapestry of love and revenge that beautifully captures the timeless pharaonic landscapes of Upper Egypt and the blind struggles of its inhabitants against poverty, exploitation, and time themes that are echoed and amplified in the short stories included in this volume, which span the breadth of Abdullah's tragically short career as one of Egypt's most brilliant writers of modern fiction.
Download or read book Pyramid Texts written by Gamal al-Ghitani and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007-02-01 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Chaos of the Senses written by Ahlam Mosteghanemi and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?
Download or read book The Emergence of the Gulf States written by John Peterson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Dreams of Departure written by Najīb Maḥfūẓ and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories.
Download or read book The Crane written by Halim Barakat and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Crane, the renowned Syro-Lebanese author and sociologist Halim Barakat creates a narrator who looks back wistfully on a childhood in a small village of Syria, with the image of flying cranes and in particular one wounded bird as a continuing symbol of his emotions toward the past and its impact upon his life. The narrator then travels to the United States, and, with his wife, goes through the experiences of American college life in the 1960s. He describes his participation in the political protests during that fraught decade, and goes on to depict his later life in the American capital of Washington DC and its surroundings. The link between narrator and author is clearly a close one, and yet the careful way in which the narrative's sequence is constructed allows the reader to invoke the world of the imagination in interpreting this nostalgic account of a Middle Eastern childhood and its international aftermath.
Download or read book La Momie de la Momification written by Jamāl Ghīṭānī and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Last Of The Angels written by Fadhil al-Azzawi and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk during the 1950s, The Last of the Angels tells the slyly humorous tale of three strikingly different people in one small neighborhood. During a labor strike against the British-run Iraq Petroleum Company, Hameed Nylon becomes a labor organizer and later a revolutionary, like his hero, Mao Tse-Tung. His brother-in-law, the sheep butcher Khidir Musa, travels to the Soviet Union to find his long-lost brothers, and returns home to great acclaim (and personal fortune) in an airship. Meanwhile, a young boy named Burhan Abdullah discovers an old chest in the attic of his family's house that lets him talk to angels. By turns satiric, picaresque, and apocalyptic, The Last of the Angels paints a loving, panoramic, and elegiac portrait of Kirkuk in the final years of Iraq's monarchy. But as the grim reality of modern Iraqi history catches up with the novel's events, we come to learn the depth and complexity of Hameed Nylon, Khidir Musa, and Burhan Abdullah, and al-Azzawi's comic novel becomes a moving tale of growing up in a dangerous world.
