Poetry. Ostensibly a meditation on the elusive pre-Islamic Arabic qasida, or ode, this aphoristic essay by the author of FROM ISLAND TO ISLAND sketches a detailed and tactile poetics of vision and recollection. "A concept of form for the complex poem ... polyphonic shifting, fickle."

Qasida

Literature & Fiction

Harold Schimmel

Translated By Peter Cole

History & Criticism

Ibis Editions

From Island to Island

Poetry

Fiction. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux. This hypnotically lyrical last novel by the leading Palestinian prose writer of the twentieth century is equal parts allegory, folk tale, memoir, political commentary, and ode to a ruined landscape. Rendered for the first time ever in English by one of the leading translators of contemporary Arabic literature, it is a haunting tour de force-essential reading for anyone interested in the imaginative life of the Middle East. "In Arabic, Habiby has had no precursors and has had no successors.... Acknowledging his debt to Voltaire and Swift, he has proven inimitable." -Middle East Magazine.

Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale

Emile Habiby

Contemporary

Drama. A modern version of a toy-theater play, but for adults. Its figures include wind-ups and other shop-bought toys, adapted to the conditions of a table-performance. The nub of the five interlinked acts is the clockwork affair between the atrocious Cap'n Bimbo, spymaster, and Belinda, his infatuated scout, who never learned to count at spy school. The biking boys of the Mediterranean Squad are caught in the crossfire. LIFE ISN'T ALL BIKE-CLIPS is a light-hearted satire on a stingy heart.

Life Isn't All Bike-Clips

Silk, Dennis

Schimmel, Abigail

Dramas & Plays

Cultural Writing. REVEALMENT AND CONCEALMENT is ... a series of profound and highly influential essays on Hebrew and Jewish culture ... collected in a new and handsomely produced English edition -- Jonathan Wilson, The Times Literary Supplement. This important collection gathers together five essays by Haim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), by all accounts the greatest modern Hebrew poet, and a writer who has long defied translation. A key figure in the renaissance of Hebrew Culture at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Translated by Zali Gurevitch who teaches at the Hebrew University and is the author of six books of poetry.

Revealment And Concealment : Five Essays

Bialik, Haim

Bialik, Haim, N.

Poetry. Translation. One of the great mystics of all time, Muhyiddin Ibn al-'Arabi was a prolific author who wrote on every aspect of medieval Islamic thought. Michael Sell's STATIONS OF DESIRE contains the first translations of Ibn 'Arabi's TURJUMAN into modern poetic English. Sells, one of the most distinguished contemporary translators of classical Arabic poetry, carries into his translations the supple, resonant quality of the original Arabic. The book also includes a selection of Sell's original poems, which are modeled on the Turjuman and serve as a further commentary on the medieval odes and their extension into the present climate of poetry.

Stations Of Desire: Love Elegies From Ibn 'Arabi And New Poems (Ibis Editions)

Sells, MIchael

Taha Muhammad Ali is one of the leading poets on the contemporary Palestinian literary scene. He writes in a forceful, direct style, with disarming humor and unflinching, at times, painful, honesty -- the poetry's apparent simplicity and homespun truths concealing the subtle grafting of classical Arabic and colloquial forms of expression. NEVER MIND is the poet's first collection in English. Translated by Peter Cole and Gabriel Levin.

Never Mind: Twenty Poems And A Story

Peter Cole

Taha Muhammad Ali

Ali, Taha Muhammad

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by Richard Sieburth. Edited, Introduced, and Annotated by Steven M. Wasserstrom. One of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem virtually created the subject of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism as a serious area of study. His influence, however, has been felt far beyond the confines of the academy and to this day extends into the realm of literature and the arts. (Borges, for one, rhymed "Golem" with "Scholem.") Literature played a critical part in Scholem's own life, especially in his formative years, and he wrote poems from his teens on. This bilingual volume gathers together the best of them for the first time in any language. It contains dark, shockingly prescient political poems about Zionism and assimilation, parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, religious lyrics of a gnostic bent, and poems to other writers and friends such as Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, Ingeborg Bachmann, S. Y. Agnon, and others. "Abrupt, magisterial, quizzical, sometimes acidulous, and at moments poignantly wistful.... Scholem's verses return to an authentic Hasidic tradition of indicting God"—Harold Bloom.

The Fullness of Time: Poems (English and German Edition)

SCHOLEM,GERSHOM

Poetry. Translated from the Arabic by Nazih Kassis. The first-ever English collection by this major Palestinian poet. Born in 1939, al-Qasim first achieved fame as one of the celebrated "resistance poets" and over the decades he has produced a body of work that is as varied and innovative as it is large. This volume collects poems from his various periods and modes (short, long, lyrical, caustic) and finally makes available to English readers the full range of al-Qasim's oeuvre. An outspoken opponent of racism and oppression on all sides of the Middle East conflict, al-Qasim is a major figure in the Arab world. A must for anyone interested in world literature.

Sadder than Water: New and Selected Poems

Samih al-Qasim

Cultural writing. Biography and Memoir. Edited and translated from the Greek by Roderick Beaton. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Greek poet and diplomat George Seferis stands as one of the giants of twentieth-century literature. This book presents for the first time in English selections from the journals he kept while traveling in the Middle East. With characteristic vividness and concision, Seferis reflects both on what he sees and what lies behind (and ahead of) the visible, as the journals include superb passages of travel writing and meditations on the Levant's Hellenistic legacy, the holy sites of the region, the history of prominent British women travelers to the area, and of course the turbulent politics of his day. As such, they move between private and public dimensions of the poet's life and provide an intimate look into his world.

A Levant Journal

Biographies & Memoirs

George Seferis

Arts & Literature

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