Your Search Results(showing 769)

    • Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)x
    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction

      Dirt and Stars

      by Ahmad Lufti

      How do you imagine the Arabs before Islam? People who drink alcohol, milk goats, and fight each other for trivial reasons? Or perhaps you imagine them ignorant in an environment of darkness and sand? In this short story collection, Ahmad Lufti presents a fresh picture of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam, its legends and poets, its kings and its oral traditions. Inspired by the storytelling form of Scheherazade in “One Thousand and One Nights”—in which one narrator tells a story about another narrator, and another—as well as traditional Arab tales, Lufti’s stories explore and exalt Arab history and culture as well as larger themes of love, weakness, and power. Commentary from the Author: I am trying to reintroduce prose in Arab stories, as an attempt to praise authors whose books were highly underestimated. These works of art were deeply criticized for focusing on the pre-Islamic era or for adopting a classical rigid style. It is crucial to revive Arab stories, this pristine and rich field that would never fail to exist, even if all authors were to perish. This has proven of importance in modern stories, which are the reflection of the contemporary human. How can we refute modern stereotypes, if Arab literature is absent from today’s books?

    • Trusted Partner
      Literature & Literary Studies
      September 2017

      The Pianoplayers

      by Anthony Burgess

      by Will Carr, Paul Wake, Andrew Biswell

      This novel is one of Anthony Burgess's most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of the working-class Lancashire of the 1920s and 1930s that he knew from his own early life. The Pianoplayers is a funny, moving, autobiographical novel that brings to life the world of silent cinemas and music-halls of 1920s Manchester and Blackpool. Fully annotated and with a new introduction, this is an authoritative text for a new generation of readers. Part of the forthcoming Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, this book offers an opportunity to reappraise an unjustly neglected novel important to our understanding of Burgess's wider oeuvre. The 2017 Burgess centenary makes this a key moment for reflection on the life and work of a major figure in twentieth century letters.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      September 2017

      A Vision of Battlements

      by Anthony Burgess

      by Andrew Biswell, Paul Wake

      A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil's Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce's Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured. The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess's forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      April 2017

      My Cat and I Miss You Very Much

      by Yanborenchangan

      This is a book telling lovely and warm stories between pets and human beings.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      January 2017

      Farewells on Earth

      by LIU Wen

      LIU Wen, winner of Hong Kong Youth Literary Awards, records stories about love, growing-up and courage of life in a huge, indifferent city.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2021

      Eye on Egypt: Café Riche

      by Maisoon Saqer

      The book opens a unique door to the history of Cairo and its journey from a social and cultural perspective and aims to build a new and different narrative for this history—one that shows Cairo as a cosmopolitan, multicultural city. Cairo’s Cafe Riche has a deep cultural history and a broad creative and social heritage. Saqer describes it as “the site where endless friendships are established between the café and history.” Saqer’s narrative is not just about the small café, but rather constitutes observance and analysis of the presence of this café in the history of Egypt and how we can view many events surrounding it. Here there is no separation between the political and the cultural, between the historical, the social, and the artistic. The book combines history and narrative, which makes it a documented historical biography on the one hand and a creative work on the other. It also documents an important era in Egypt’s cultural history by examining the cultural and social transformations in modern Egyptian history and highlighting prominent intellectuals and creators associated with the cafe and the history of intellectual life in Egypt.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2021

      The Mystery of the Glass Ball

      by Maria Dadouch

      Ghassan Al Ghurairi had to accompany his old grandfather to the Leewy Museum in the middle of the desert. They are attending a ceremony honoring his grandfather, who spent his entire life in service of the desert. As they head to their destination onboard an ancient train, Ghassan came across a conspiracy plotted by the criminal Aqrabawi and his bald friend— disguised as two elderly women—to poison the oasis’s water supply. In place of the ecological life in the desert, they want to make way for an international resort and take over the place. Although Ghassan doesn’t mean to confront this conspiracy alone, he finds himself embroiled face-to-face with the criminals. Fortunately for him, a girl appears at his side to help. Sophia Al-Adnani from Chiparazumpia is also heading with her grandfather and his great eco-friendly invention, the glass ball, to the Leewy Museum, where her grandfather is to be honored. The two children are able to hold off the criminals initially, but not for long, as Aqrabawi and his friend soon reappear—this time deadest on revenge against the two children. Ghassan and Sophia resist in the face of intimidation and threats, and, using clever intrigue, they manage to disarm the conspirators and escape seconds before the desert guards arrive and arrest the criminals.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2021

      Strangers at Home

      by Ezzat El-Kamhawi

      The novel brings together residents of a multi-story building. In a world besieged by COVID-19, Ezzat El-Kamhawi’s new novel places its main characters in a fictional world dominated by isolation and obsessions, where people are forced to surrender to a crushing flood of memories. FROM THE SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: “The novel explores the pandemic and its impacts on social life in Egypt, by presenting examples of the people who suffered from the disease. Structurally, it interacts with other literary genres and combines realism and fantasy.”

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2021

      Composition Biography: Thoughts and Confusion Carry Me

      by Said Bengrad

      The book is a story that combines childhood living in the 1960s deserts, before current forms of technology and virtualization. In this narrative text, it was not a matter of resurrecting a moment in a fleeting life in a non-stop chronology, but of shaping it into concepts that reconstruct it in an abstract way. The text does not present an individual story, but rather redraws the boundaries of an entire generation’s experience, a generation that saw the light after Morocco’s independence, with all of its subsequent achievements, failures, victories, and tragedies. The narrator in the text does not present ready-made theories; instead, he captures life in its events and facts and elevates it to an abstract level pending contemplation. The event in the text is an excuse for restoring life in the form of a “human experience,” and that is the outlet for returning academic knowledge to its role as an incubator for people’s concerns as depicted by their narratives, stories, and beliefs. What people experience by instinct; the story turns into another story constructed in the abstract. We do not simply live, we also contemplate our own living, and this is the sublime function of narration.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2020

      A Laughing Sun

      by Bayan Al Safadi

      These poetic tales for children address things around us such as the wall, the stone, the ear, the river, and others, humanize them, and present them as free verse poetry. It also includes an audio CD containing song versions of the tales, all of which are loaded with pedagogical, aesthetic, and humanitarian messages. The importance of “A Laughing Sun” stems from its adoption of the poetic tale in most poems. It carries implications for reverence of science, arts, freedom, and human diversity, and highlights the beauty of nature and the protection of the environment. The poems are replete with a sense of cheerfulness and humor, and the collection focuses on the imagination and stimulates both scientific and creative thinking.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2022

      My Date With the Light

      by Raja Malah

      The character of the novel “My Date with the Light” was born with a rare disease that gradually eliminates her sense of sight. From an early age, she realized that she was in a struggle with time and loss. Who said that this little girl in that remote village between its harsh mountains and deep valleys will one day be able to turn her date with darkness into a date with light, insight, and hope? She left her village in search of scientific horizons and dreamy expanses. Twenty years later, she decided to return to her hometown, believing in her role in assisting the children of her village. In her cabin, between the night silence and train whistles, she begins to tell her life story so we can learn about the details of her childhood, her handicap, her family, her village that languishes in poverty and destitution... To witness how she was finally able to make her way towards achieving her dream with rare courage, and touch the light of success, despite losing sight. Age Range: 9-12 years

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      May 2019

      Mozart and the Wolf Gang

      By Anthony Burgess

      by Alan Shockley

      Written in 1991 to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart's death, Burgess's novella-length piece is a compendium of themes, genres and even art-forms revolving around the one central preoccupation of the entire Burgess oeuvre: the reconcilability of life and art. This is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of even Anthony Burgess's fiction in an attempt to understand Mozart through celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, and fragments of a film script. As gracefully witty as it is daringly experimental, Mozart and the Wolf Gang is one of Burgess's late, great works, often overlooked due to its experimental form, which nevertheless remains accessible, entertaining and yet refreshingly original to this day. This new critical edition with analysis from noted musicologist and a first-class literary critic Alan Shockley enables this work's significance within the fields of literary modernism, fictional biography, and fiction about music, to be assessed by a new generation of readers and scholars.

    • Trusted Partner
      Literature & Literary Studies
      February 2019

      ABBA ABBA: By Anthony Burgess

      by Paul Howard, Andrew Biswell

      ABBA ABBA is one of Anthony Burgess's most original works, combining fiction, poetry and translation. A product of his time in Italy in the early 1970s, this delightfully unconventional book is part historical novel, part poetry collection, as well as a meditation on translation and the generating of literature by one of Britain's most inventive post-war authors. Set in Papal Rome in the winter of 1820-21, Part One recreates the consumptive John Keats's final months in the Eternal City and imagines his meeting the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. Pitting Anglo-Italian cultures and sensibilities against each other, Burgess creates a context for his highly original versions of 71 sonnets by Belli, which feature in Part Two. This new edition includes extra material by Burgess, along with an introduction and notes by Paul Howard, Fellow in Italian Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      November 2018

      Beard's Roman Women

      By Anthony Burgess

      by Graham Foster

      Anthony Burgess draws upon an autobiographical episode to create Beard's Roman Women, the story of a man haunted by his first wife, presumed dead. But is she? A marvellously economical book, full-flavoured, funny, and heartfelt, showing its author at the height of his powers. This new edition is the first to be published with David Robinson's photographs for over 40 years. The text of the novel has been restored using the original typescripts, and Graham Foster's new introduction provides valuable insight into the fictional and biographical contexts of the novel. The text is fully annotated with a detailed set of notes and this edition includes the previously unpublished script for Burgess's television film By the Waters of Leman: Byron and Shelley at Geneva, and a rare piece of Burgess's writing about Rome.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      September 2018

      Puma

      By Anthony Burgess

      by Paul Wake, Andrew Biswell

      Puma - disentangled from the three-part structure of The End of the World News and published here for the first time in its intended format - is Anthony Burgess's lost science fiction novel. Set some way into the future, the story details the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy - the dreaded Puma. It is a visceral book about the end of history as man has known it. Despite its apocalyptic theme, its earthquakes and tidal waves, murder and madness, Puma is a gloriously-comic novel, steeped in the rich literary heritage of a world soon to be extinguished and celebrating humanity in all its squalid glory. In Burgess's hands this meditation on destruction, mitigated by the hope of salvation for a select few, becomes powerful exploration of friendship, violence, literature and science at the end of the world.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      March 2020

      Imago

      Gedichte

      by Kolbe, Uwe

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2022

      Where to, O Poem

      by Ali Jaafar Al Allaq

      This autobiographical work centers on literary creativity. Poet Ali Jaafar Alallaq recollects his academic and professional experiences, as well as their diverse ventures into poetic, literary, critical, and academic writing earlier in his life. The book covers the poet’s upbringing in a humble, impoverished village, his family’s subsequent move to Baghdad in the early 1950s, and his journey up until the present day. ///The biography details a plethora of human, cultural, and poetic events that impacted Alallaq’s perspective on events he witnessed, interacted with, or was involved in. These events range in intensity and scope, spanning from his childhood years in the countryside to navigating significant societal changes in Baghdad, and from his early explorations in writing and literary journalism to pursuing doctoral studies in the United Kingdom. He reflects on enduring two destructive wars that displaced Iraq’s people, leading to a life of exile and reliance on divine providence under the night sky. ///Beginning in 1991, Alallaq began a long period abroad that included six years of teaching at Sanaa University, followed by ten years of work at the United Arab Emirates University from 1997 to 2015. He produced a remarkable body of poetry and critical works during his tenure as a university instructor and his active involvement in cultural and poetic affairs in Sanaa and later in the UAE, which continues to this day. ///In this book, Alallaq takes on several roles, including narrator, contemplator, restorer, and descriptor, and expresses himself using elevated literary language. As a result, the work serves as an aesthetic testament to the purity of language as well as a cohesive account of the ups and downs of daily life. Despite living and working in a prosperous and stable environment for many years, he remains emotionally and imaginatively connected to the events and struggles affecting his country and the Arab world. He continues to document his aesthetic and patriotic testimony of current happenings, as clearly evidenced in his present autobiography.

    • Trusted Partner
      Fiction
      2022

      The End of the Desert

      by Said Khatibi

      On a nice fall day of 1988, Zakiya Zaghwani was found lying dead at the edge of the desert, giving way to a quest to discover the circumstances surrounding her death. While looking for whoever was involved in the death of the young singer, nearby residents discover bit by bit their involvement in many things other than the crime itself. ///The story takes place in a town near the desert. And as with Khatibi’s previous novels, this one is also marked by a tight plot, revolving around the murder of a singer who works in a hotel. This sets off a series of complex investigations that defy easy conclusions and invite doubt about the involvement of more than one character. /// Through the narrators of the novel, who also happen to be its protagonists, the author delves into the history of colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence and its successors, describing the circumstances of the story whose events unfold throughout the month. As such, the characters suspected of killing the singer are not only accused of a criminal offense, but are also concerned, as it appears, with the great legacy that the War of Independence left, from different aspects.///The novel looks back at a critical period in the modern history of Algeria that witnessed the largest socio-political crisis following its independence in 1988. While the story avoids the immediate circumstances of the war, it rather invokes the events leading up to it and tracks its impact on the social life, while capturing the daily life of vulnerable and marginalized groups. /// Nonetheless, those residents’ vulnerability does not necessarily mean they are innocent. As it appears, they are all involved in a crime that is laden with symbolism and hints at the status of women in a society shackled by a heavy legacy of a violent, wounded masculinity. This approach to addressing social issues reflects a longing to break loose from the stereotypical discourse that sets heroism in a pre-defined mold and reduces the truth to only one of its dimensions.

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