ARABIC LITERATURE

A devastating autobiographical novel based on the treatment of the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein. A man is incarcerated in a number of different prisons throughout Iraq where he is witness to illness, alienation and torture. A profound and moving record of a dark period in the history of the Middle East.

No single book has encompassed the vast scope of Edward Said's erudition quite like Power, Politics and Culture - a collection of his interviews from the last three decades. In these 29 interviews, Said addresses everything from Palestine to Pavarotti, from his nomadic upbringing under colonial rule to his politically active and often controversial life in America, and reflects on Austen, Beckett, Conrad, Naipaul, Mahfouz and Rushdie as well as fellow critics Bloom, Derrida and Foucault. Said speaks here with his usual candour, acuity and eloquence - confirming that he was in his lifetime among the truly most important intellects of our century.

Powerfully and poetically written this is an Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy moral about international misconceptions and delusions. The brilliant student of an earlier generation returns to his Sudanese village; obsession with the mysterious West and a desire to bite the hand that has half-fed him, has led him to London and the beds of women with similar obsessions about the mysterious East. He kills them at the point of ecstacy and the Occident, in its turn destroys him.

Translator: Issa J. Boullata

A collection of stories follows the experiences of Lebanese war refugees in Paris as they adjust to Western culture - especially the liberal relations between men and women.

Translator: Dorothy Blair

This novel exposes with honesty and lyricism the various issues that affect a young woman living in a city which is both sophisticated and provincial, liberal and conservative, tolerant and prejudiced.

A unique anthology offering English translations of previously unavailable Arabic texts. Each story has been beautifully translated and carefully collected in this unique updated edition. The Modern Arabic Short Story provides a valuable introduction and overview of this classical form of storytelling.

Samira Kawar, Paul Starkey, Issa J. Boullata, Christina Phillips, Shakir Mustafa, Fiona Collins

An Iraqi in Paris is a journey to fulfil a dream of a young Iraqi boy from Baghdad to Hollywood, although he reaches every other place except his primary destination, a book full of real life and real people and an account on the places that the author found himself unintentionally involved with, and even in the most sad and dark parts of his journey.

This is a love story, a story about growing up, a story about what its like to be a women (East and West), a story about the history of the post-imperial Middle East during the last 30 years or so, perplexed and bloody years, and a story about home.

Ahdaf Soueif is one of the finest commentators of our time. Her clear-eyed reporting is syndicated throughout the world, and these essays, written between 1981 and the present, are collected here for the first time. They are the direct result of Soueif’s own circumstances of being, as she puts it, "like hundreds of thousands of others: people with an Arab or a Muslim background doing daily double-takes when faced with their reflection in a western mirror". Whether an account of visiting Palestine and entering the Noble Sanctuary, an interpretation of women who choose to wear the veil, or her post-September 11th reflections, these selected essays are always perceptive, fearless, intelligent and necessary.

Translator: Farouk Abdel Wahab

Unwilling to recant his Nasserist beliefs, the unnamed narrator is an Egyptian journalist in a self-imposed exile in Europe after conflict with the management of his newspaper and a divorce from his wife. Absorbed in introspection over his impotent position at the paper and in ill health, he suddenly finds himself faced with two issues he cannot ignore: the escalating tensions in Israeli-occupied Lebanon and, more personally, an unexpected love affair with a much younger Austrian woman, Brigitte. The narrator's familial exile has left him a 'long-distance father' facing the difficulties of raising children from whom he is rapidly growing distant. His son is drifting into fundamentalism while his daughter falls under the materialistic sway of the west. After struggling mightily to remain part of their lives, he finds himself marginalized and rejected. Brigitte, also an exile of sorts, encourages him to turn his back on the problems and pressures of the everyday world and cocoon himself in the warmth of their love.However, the horror of events surrounding the occupation of Lebanon in 1982 soon shocks them out of their contentment and safety.