This elegant, haunting novel takes us deep into the world of bookstore owner Boualem Yekker. He lives in a country being overtaken by the Vigilant Brothers, a radically conservative party that seeks to control every element of life according to the laws of their stringent moral theology: no work of beauty created by human hands should rival the ...
Set in the 1960s in Paris' Jewish quarter, "Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran" is about a troubled Jewish boy, Moses, or Momo, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a solitary Muslim shopkeeper named Monsieur Ibrahim. Momo's hilarious yet heart-wrenching story begins when he loses his virginity in a bordello at the age of 11. ...
Assia Djebar, the most distinguished woman writer to emerge from the Arab world - and a top candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature - wrote "Children of the New World" following her own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule. Djebar's novel sheds light on current world conflicts as it reveals a determined Arab ...
Translated for the first time in English, this collection of short fiction details the plight of urban Algerian women and raises far-reaching issues. The stories criticise the post-colonial socialist regime, which is seen as denying and subjugating women whilst celebrating the liberation of men.
The Rift explores textuality, writing, solitude, and death in the context of contemporary African life, and at the same time examines the constitution and materiality of African subjectivity. V. Y. Mudimbe's writing is provocative, demanding, and distinctly modernist. In its compelling exploration of the production of African knowledge within or ...
This novel won the French Prix Méditerranée in 1991, and in 1993 author Tahar Djaout was murdered by Algerian Islamic extremists. Newly translated, THE WATCHERS is about Menouar, an elderly man who was once a member of the Algerian resistance movement, and his neighbor Mahfoudh, who invents a new kind of loom and must buck the local bureaucrats, ...
Helene de Beauvoir, a painter, grew up in the shadow of her extraordinary older sister, Simone. Until now, the remarkable extent to which their relationship shaped both their lives has been overlooked. In this intimate biography, the reader learns not only about their close relationship and artistic influence on one another, but also about the ...
When the Taliban was ousted as the ruling party of Afghanistan, the iconic images of newfound freedom were those of men shaving their beards and women removing their veils. In Women of Afghanistan, French journalist Isabelle Delloye goes beyond the images-and behind the veils-and collects the crucial and fascinating stories of Afghani women from ...
In the pages of this slim, powerful book Rob Riemen argues with passion that 'nobility of spirit' is the quintessence of a civilized world. It is, as Thomas Mann believed, the sole corrective for human history. Without nobility of spirit, culture vanishes. Yet, in the early twenty-first century, a time when human dignity and freedom are imperiled, ...
Djebar uses the deaths of three friends--a sociologist, a psychiatrist, and a playwright--as a springboard for a meditation on the history of modern Algeria and an insider's view of the horrors of civil war.
Christians in Palestine is journalist Jean Rolin's highly personalized account of the lives of the Arab Christian population in Palestine. Set on the eve of the Iraq War, when Rolin visited Bethlehem, Ramallah and Jerusalem, this detailed portrayal reveals a people torn between their religious beliefs and their Arab patriotism, loathe to criticize ...
A modern day "Things Fall Apart", "The Amputated Memory" explores the ways in which an African woman's memory preserves, and strategically forgets, moments in her tumultuous past as well as the cultural past of her country, in the hopes of making a healthier future possible. Pinned between the political ambitions of her philandering father, the ...
The authors of oral literature in the Pashtun language create their work at a far remove from any books. Generally deprived of the support of schools and universities, their compositions are inseparable from song. Their poetry is never declaimed; rather, their rhyme and rhythm have melodic value. These popular improvisations do not exalt mystic ...
Two women meet in a prison cell--one black and one white, one young and one old, one dying and the other going mad. Tanga, the young black woman, tells her life story--a tale of incest, prostitution, bereavement, and crime--and in doing so she fuses her identity with the white woman, who will live.
"Walking Heads" refers to individuals especially entrenched inside their heads, without any instinctive contact with the rest of the body. Their childhoods were spent in situations difficult to endure and from which there was no escape. Therefore, and out of sheer necessity, they called upon their ability to fantasize to find a way out of their ...
These two novels, written by West African painter, writer, playwright and director Werewere Liking, spare nothing in their satirical portraits of the patriarchal view of African society as they experiment radically with the novel form.
This engaging work demonstrates that beauty truly does come from within. "Plastic surgery is not a magic wand," declares Dr. Jean-Claude Hagege in his critique of the dangerous confusion between beauty and seductiveness. Having seen, spoken with, and operated on hundreds of patients, Hagege offers a unique perspective on the important distinction ...
This volume collects autobiographical reflections by Algerian writers concerning their difficult childhoods in postcolonial Algeria. Helene Cixous and Malek Alloula, among others, share their memories and insights on growing up in this violent region.
Broken hearts, edgy nerves, tightened throats--our emotions grab and take hold of us. But if our emotions appear obvious to us, are they necessarily real or universal? This, of course, is what researchers in physiology and psychology assert, but they will ultimately be disappointed. Vinciane Despret sets out in this book to show how some of our ...
Set in the grim world of urban prostitution, this novel gives voice to the multitude of women trapped in African ghettos. The author, now resident in Paris, hails from Cameroon. Her other novels include "Loukoum: the Little Prince of Belleville" and "Your Name Shall be Tanga".
For the health of the psyche and the culture, for the individual and the whole society, oblivion is as necessary as memory. One must know how to forget, Marc Auge suggests, not just to live fully in the present but also to comprehend the past. Renowned as an anthropologist and an innovative social thinker, Auge's meditation moves from how ...
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