Books, Literature & Fiction, Foreign Language Fiction, Arabic

Page 1 of 24 | next

Mahmoud Darwish
The Butterfly's Burden (Arabic Edition)
by Copper Canyon Press (Paperback)

"Mahmoud Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging, exquisitely tuned singer of images that invoke, link, and shine a brilliant light into the world's whole heart. What he speaks has been embraced by readers around the world-his in an utterly necessary voice, unforgettable once discovered."-Naomi Shihab Nye Mahmoud Darwish is the leading poet in the Arab world, an artist and activist who attracts thousands to his public readings. The Butterfly's Burden combines the complete text of Darwish's two most recent full-length volumes, linked by the stunning memoir-witness poem "A State of Siege." Love poems, sonnets, journal-like distillations, and interlaced lyrics balance old literary traditions with new forms, highlighting loving reflections alongside bitter longing. From Sonnet [V] I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place. Patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle. ...

Nizar Kabbani
Arabian Love Poems (Three Continents Press)
by Three Continents Press (Paperback)

This translation of Nizar Kabbani's poetry is accompanied by the striking Arabic texts of the poems, penned by Kabbani especially for this collection. Kabbani was a poet of great simplicity - direct, spontaneous, musical, using the language of everyday life. He was a ceasless campaigner for women's rights, and his verses praise the beauty of the female body, and of love. He was an Arab nationalist, yet he criticized Arab dictators and the lack of freedom in the Arab world.

Mahmoud Darwish
Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (Arabic Edition)
by Archipelago Books (Paperback)

At once an intimate autobiography and a collective memory of the Palestinian people, Mahmoud Darwish's interlinked poems are collective cries, songs, and glimpses of the human condition. The collection-widely considered his chef-d'oeuvre-is a poetry of myth and history, of exile and suspended time, of an identity bound to the Arabic language and his displaced people. Darwish's poems-specific and symbolic, simple and profound-are historical glimpses, existential queries, chants of pain and injustice of a people separated from their land.

Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Code (Arabic Edition)
by Arab Scientific Publishers (Paperback) (Release Date: 2005-02-07)

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci -- clues visible for all to see -- yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others. In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret -- and an explosive historical truth ...

Danielle Steel
Five Days in Paris (Arabic Translation) (Arabic Edition)
by Arab Scientific Publishers (Paperback) (Release Date: 2005-05-20)

Yousef Al-Mohaimeed
Wolves of the Crescent Moon
by Penguin (Non-Classics) (Paperback)

Banned in Saudi Arabia, this provocative, fast-paced debut novel confirms what The Washington Post reported about its award-winning author: “Yousef Al-Mohaimeed is taking on some of the most divisive subjects in the Arab world . . . in a lush style that evokes Gabriel García Márquez.” In a Riyadh bus station, a man comes across a file containing official reports about an abandoned baby. As he pieces together the shattered life documented within, a larger picture emerges of three outsiders—a Bedouin, an orphan, and a eunuch—linked by fate and trying to make lives for themselves in a predatory city. Unfolding with the intensity of a fever dream over the course of one night, Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a novel of astonishing power and great moral consequence about a deeply traditional society confronting the modern world.

Sulayman Al-Bassam
The Al-Hamlet Summit
by University Of Hertfordshire Press (Paperback)

Powerful and disturbing, this version of the Hamlet story is set in a modern Middle Eastern state whose leader has just died, to be replaced by his brother, a ruthless, Westernized dictator who juggles petro-dollars, arms dealers, and democratic slogans in an attempt to quell the rising tides of Islamic extremism. Presenting a composite of many Arab concerns that affect peoples from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond, it is a concrete and poetic formulation of an Arab viewpoint, combining aspects of the Arab oral-poetry tradition with the rhetoric of modern-day politics. It is Hamlet as pure, dangerous politics.

Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati
Love, Death, and Exile: Poems Translated from Arabic
by Georgetown University Press (Paperback)

Called "a major innovator in his art form" by THE NEW YORK TIMES, Baghdad-born poet Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati broke with over fifteen centuries of Arabic poetic tradition to write in free verse and became world famous in the process. LOVE, DEATH, AND EXILE: POEMS TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC is a rare, bilingual facing-page edition in both the original Arabic text and a highly praised English translation by Bassam K. Frangieh, containing selections from eight of Al-Bayati's books of poetry. Forced to spend much of his life in exile from his native Iraq, Al-Bayati created poetry that is not only revolutionary and political, but also steeped in mysticism and allusion, moving and full of longing. This collection is a superb introduction to Al-Bayati, Arabic language, and Arabic literature and culture as well. On Al-Bayati's death in 1999, THE NEW YORK TIMES obituary quoted him as saying once that his many years of absence from his homeland had been a "tormenting experience" that ...

Haifa Zangana
Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series)
by University of Texas Press (Paperback)

Exiled, displaced, tortured, and grieving—each of the five Iraqi women whose lives and losses come to us through Haifa Zangana's skillfully wrought novel is searching in her own way for peace with a past that continually threatens to swallow up the present. Majda, the widow of a former Ba'ath party official who was killed by the government he served. Adiba, a political dissident tortured under Saddam Hussein's regime. Um Mohammed, a Kurdish refugee who fled her home for political asylum. Iqbal, a divorced mother whose family in Iraq is suffering the effects of Western economic sanctions. And Sahira, the wife of a Communist politician, struggling with his disillusionment and her own isolation. Bound to one another by a common Iraqi identity and a common location in 1990s London, these women come together across differences in politics, ethnic and class background, age, and even language. In narrating the friendship that develops among them, Zangana captures their warmth and ...

Saad El Shazly
October War, Arabic Edition
by American Mideast Research (Paperback)

The October war is the Arabic revised edition, with three new chapters. It is an inside look by the Egyptian Chief of Staff at events leading up to and including the 1973 Arab Israeli war. The book gives a day to day account of the war, the capture of the Bar Lev line, the subsequent split between the political and military leadership and the aftermath of the Israeli penetration through Egyptian lines The new chapters are a response to the questions and opinions about the war and the book since its first publication 1980

Page 1 of 24 | next