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Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award A TIME Best Book of the Year A New Yorker Best Book of the Year An extraordinary novel from a Man Booker International Prize-winning author that follows one young Omani woman as she builds a life for herself in Britain and reflects on the relationships that have made her from a “remarkable” writer who has “constructed her own novelistic form” (James Wood, The New Yorker). From Man Booker International Prize–winning author Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman’s attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and ...
Marilyn Booth's elegantly conceived study reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male-authored, in the late nineteenth century short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. Booth uses over five hundred "famous women" biographies—which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu, and Lucy Stone—to demonstrate how these narratives prescribed complex role models for middle-class...
An interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and by visitors to those societies.
A study of the career and writings of Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) an early feminist thinker and writer in Egypt. It focuses on her newspaper essays, novels, poetry, and her play which was the first to be published by a female author in Arabic.
Celestial Bodies is the International Booker-winning and internationally bestselling novel from Jokha Alharthi. Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured and taut, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s ...
'Barakat isn't writing about 'the immigrant'. She's writing about the human.' Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind Shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Translation * Longlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award, 2022 Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a devastating story of displacement, war, and the unlikely glimmer of hope in the dark In an unnamed country torn apart by war, six strangers are compelled to share their darkest secrets. Taking pen to paper, each attempts to put in writing what they can’t bring themselves to say to the person they love – mother, father, brother, lost love. Their words form a chain of dark confessions, none of wh...
Egypt just before political eruption! Turns of the century in Africa's northeastern corner have been critical moments, ushering in overt popular activism in the hope of radical political redirection--as this volume's focus on Egypt's 19th-century fin-de-siecle demonstrates. The end of the 19th century in Egypt witnessed crisscrossing and conflicting political currents as well as fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social conditions, demographic conditions and cultural processes. Like Egypt's 20th-century fin-de-siecle, much of this ferment was a prelude to the more visible and politically eruptive events of the next decades, when Egypt's popular resistance burst onto the international scene. But its subterranean cast was no less dynamic for that.
The Open Door is a landmark of women's writing in Arabic. Published in 1960, it was very bold for its time in exploring a middle-class Egyptian girl's coming of sexual and political age, in the context of the Egyptian nationalist movement preceding the 1952 revolution. The novel traces the pressures on young women and young men of that time and class as they seek to free themselves of family control and social expectations. Young Layla and her brother become involved in the student activism of the 1940s and early 1950s and in the popular resistance to continued imperialist rule; the story culminates in the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Gamal Abd al-Nasser's nationalization of the Canal led to a British, French, and Israeli invasion. Not only daring in her themes, Latifa al-Zayyat was also bold in her use of colloquial Arabic, and the novel contains some of the liveliest dialogue in modern Arabic literature. "Not only a great novel, but a literary landmark that shaped our consciousness." Abdel Moneim Tallima "A great anticolonialist work in a feminist key." Ferial Ghazoul "Latifa al-Zayyat greatly helped all of us Egyptian writers in our early writing careers." Naguib Mahfouz
Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political, academic and legal contexts. The second view is most at home in multilingual cultures, in circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority and dialectal communities, and oral cultures), in the fluidity of electronic ...