Every Year we try to build the collection to help our community in their research needs. This page will highlight new titles to our collection in the past year.
No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by
In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, one Syrian family collapses into tragedy and ruin. The mother, abandoned by her husband, struggles to raise her children alone. Her daughter Sawsan flirts with the militias, the ruling party, and finally religion, seeking but never finding salvation. All are slowly choked in the fog of violence and decay, as their lives are plundered and their dreams wrecked by the brutal Assad regime. Set between the 1960s and 2000s, No Knives in the Kitchens of this City is a graceful and profound depiction of life under tyranny. Through the story of a single family, we read the disintegration of a whole society over half a century. This novel teaches us about grief, fear, and the end ofbeauty.
Negotiating Dissidence by
In spite of harsh censorship, conservative morals and a lack of investment, women documentarists in the Arab world have found ways to subtly negotiate dissidence in their films, something that is becoming more apparent since the "Arab Revolutions". In this book, Stefanie Van de Peer traces thevery beginnings of Arab women making documentaries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from the 1970s and 1980s in Egypt and Lebanon, to the 1990s and 2000s in Morocco and Syria.Supporting a historical overview of the documentary form in the Arab world with a series of in-depth case studies, Van de Peer looks at the work of pioneering figures like Ateyyat El Abnoudy, the "mother of Egyptian documentary", Tunisia's Selma Baccar and the Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri.Addressing the context of the films' production, distribution and exhibition, the book also asks why these women held on to the ideals of a type of filmmaking that was unlikely to be accepted by the censor, and looks at precisely how the women documentarists managed to frame expressions of dissentwith the tools available to the documentary maker.
Arab Painting by
Arab painting is treated here as a significant artistic corpus in its own right. Rejecting the traditional emphasis on individual paintings, the distinguished contributors to this volume stress the integration of text and image as a more productive theoretical framework.
3/11/19
Code Name by
With irony and poignant teenage idealism, Butterfly draws us into her world of adult hypocrisy, sibling rivalries, girlfriends' power plays, unrequited love...not to mention the political tension of life under occupation. As she observes her fragile environment with all its conflicts, Butterfly is compelled to question everything around her. Is her father a collaborator for the occupiers? Will Nizar ever give her the sign she's waiting for? How will her friendship with the activist Mays and the airhead Haya survive the unpredictable storms ahead? And why is 'honour' such a dangerous word, anyway?
added 11/9/17
Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge by
On the eve of Salma's twenty-first birthday, friends and family travel to New York for a celebration reluctantly organized by her grandfather Darwish. As the guests make their way to the party, each journey takes on a greater significance than a simple trip to the city, as they find themselvesexamining their pasts, their relationships to one another, and to the country in which they live.Between Cairo and New York, Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge paints a vivid portrait of a fragmented Arab-American family, one struggling to become whole again and to let go of the past.
How Do You Say "Epigram" in Arabic? by
The qaṣīdah and the qiṭʿah are well known to scholars of classical Arabic literature, but the maqṭūʿ, a form of poetry that emerged in the thirteenth century and soon became ubiquitous, is as obscure today as it was once popular. These poems circulated across the Arabo-Islamic world for some six centuries in speech, letters, inscriptions, and, above all, anthologies. Drawing on more than a hundred unpublished and published works, How Do You Say "Epigram" in Arabic? is the first study of this highly popular and adaptable genre of Arabic poetry. By addressing this lacuna, the book models an alternative comparative literature, one in which the history of Arabic poetry has as much to tell us about epigrams as does Greek. added 5/21/19
