Books

Dreaming at the Crossroads of Cultures: Mirages

By 
Angele Ellis

Issa Makhlouf’s “Mirages” (The Post-Apollo Press, 2015), formerly translated from the Arabic into French in 2004, returns in an English edition translated by Alicia F. Lam.

 
Mirages
By Issa Makhlouf, translated into English by Alicia F. Lam
The Post-Apollo Press, 2015
 
Issa Makhlouf, an expatriate poet, possesses an anthropologist’s eye, a philosopher’s soul, a journalist’s sense of detail – and a heart rooted in the mountains and valleys of Lebanon.

Love and Loss: An Iran-Iraq Story

By 
Bobby Gulshan

For those unaccustomed to witnessing the daily, random bombardments of cities during a bloody conflict like the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, it would be hard to imagine the lives of those who actually endured those experiences.

 
For those unaccustomed to witnessing the daily, random bombardments of cities during a bloody conflict like the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, it would be hard to imagine the lives of those who actually endured those experiences. The novel “A Portal in Space” (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2015), by Mahmoud Saeed, allows readers to feel, share, and interact with the ordinary people living in war-plagued Basra, Iraq. You cannot help but feel connected to the characters as they struggle to cope with their worries, fears, and despair.

Diaspora Arab Women Writers: The Legacy of Shahrazad and Female Infanticide

By 
Nada Ramadan Elnahla

Rather than focus on Arab women’s repression from an observer’s viewpoint, Hanadi al-Samman’s “Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings” (Syracuse University Press) instead highlights the accounts of female writers living in diaspora who have contributed productively and creatively through their writings.

Broken Dreams: Love, Corruption, and the Plight of Foreign Workers in Israel

By 
By Lynne Rogers
 
"...although a Palestine mystery, “Murder Under the Bridge” presents readers with a crime that exposes the harsh plight of illegal foreign female workers in Israel and the corruption that leads to their abuse."
 
Murder Under the Bridge, a Palestine Mystery
By Kate Jessica Raphael
She Writes Press, 2015
 
Kate Jessica Raphael describes her novel, “Murder Under the Bridge, a Palestine Mystery,” as “the product of my imagination and experience – the experience and imagination of a white, Jewish American who spent around eighteen months in Palestine, with brief forays into Israel.” Her cast of characters also crosses the green line in the pursuit of love, which results in grave consequences. The mystery opens with the discovery of t

Tawfiq al-Hakim: Foretelling the Youth Revolution

By 
Nada Ramadan Elnahla

In the translator’s introduction, Radwan explains the importance of the timing of this publication, shedding light on this pioneering figure who predominantly contributed to Arabic literature through his novels, short stories, and plays. 

 
The Revolt of the Young: Essays by Tawfiq al-Hakim
Translated by Mona Radwan
Syracuse UP, 2015, 145 pp.
 
In 1984, Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987) – a major literary and intellectual figure in Egypt and the Arab world who contributed to the development of Arabic literature – wrote “Thawrat al-Shabab” (“The Revolt of the Young”).

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