City Fictions
City Fictions

Author: Amanda Holmes

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780838756737

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Using concepts from urban and cultural studies, City Fictions examines the representation of the city in the works of five important late-twentieth-century Spanish American authors, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Christina Peri Rossi, Diamela Eltit, and Carlos Monsavais. While each of these authors is influenced at least partially by a specific Spanish American city, be it Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Santiago, the element that brings them together is the way in which the city is fictionalized in their work: they all equate both language and the body with urban space. In these metaphors, language breaks down and the body disintegrates, creating a disturbing picture of violent decline. The poetry of Paz associates the urban surroundings with dissolving sentences and desensitized, fingertips; for Cortazar, characters walking through cities are seen as both creating and unraveling written texts;

Land Fictions
Land Fictions

Author: D. Asher Ghertner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-03-15

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1501753746

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Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

The Book of Jakarta
The Book of Jakarta

Author: utiuts

Publisher: Comma Press

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1912697505

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A young woman takes a driverless taxi through the streets of Jakarta, only to discover that the destination she is hurtling towards is now entirely submerged... A group of elderly women visit a famous amusement park for one last ride, but things don’t go quite according to plan... The day before her wedding, a bride risks everything to meet her former lover at their favourite seafood restaurant on the other side of the tracks... Despite being the world’s fourth largest nation – made up of over 17,000 islands – very little of Indonesian history and contemporary politics are known to outsiders. From feudal states and sultanates to a Cold War killing field and a now struggling, flawed democracy – the country’s political history, as well as its literature, defies easy explanation. Like Indonesia itself, the capital city Jakarta is a multiplicity; irreducible, unpredictable and full of surprises. Traversing the different neighbourhoods and districts, the stories gathered here attempt to capture the essence of contemporary Jakarta and its writing, as well as the ever-changing landscape of the fastest-sinking city in the world. Translated by Mikael Johani, Zoe McLaughlin, Shaffira Gayatri, Khairani Barokka, Daniel Owen, Paul Agusta, Eliza Vitri Handayani, Syarafina Vidyadhana, Rara Rizal and Annie Tucker.

The Book of Tokyo
The Book of Tokyo

Author: Hideo Furukawa

Publisher: Comma Press

Published: 2015-06-12

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13:

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A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’

The Book of Tbilisi
The Book of Tbilisi

Author: Gela Chkvanava

Publisher: Comma Press

Published: 2017-12-14

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1910974315

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A rookie reporter, searching for his first big story, re-opens a murder case that once saw crowds of protestors surround Tbilisi's central police station... A piece of romantic graffiti chalked outside a new apartment block sends its residents into a social media frenzy, trying to identify the two lovers implicated by it.... A war-orphaned teenager looks after his dying sister in an abandoned railway carriage on the edge of town, hoping that someday soon the state will take care of them... In the 26 years since Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union, the country and its capital, Tbilisi, have endured unimaginable hardships: one coup d'état, two wars with Russia, the cancer of organised crime, and prolonged periods of brutalising, economic depression. Now, as the city begins to flourish again – drawing hordes of tourists with its eclectic architecture and famous, welcoming spirit – it's difficult to reconcile the recent past with this glamorous and exotic present. With wit, warmth, heartbreaking realism, and a distinctly Georgian sense of neighbourliness, these ten stories do just that. 'Acts as an introduction to a literature quite neglected by the Anglophone world... the language consistently has the direct, clean and unadorned quality of great fiction.' – Luke Kennard. ‘A soaring, searing collection – important new stories that are sure to live long in the memory.’ – Eley Williams, author of Attrib. Published with the support of the Georgian National Book Center and the Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia.

Premonition
Premonition

Author: Randall Scott Ingermanson

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780310247050

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An extraordinary stone box was recently discovered in Jerusalem---the bone-box of 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.' This is his story . . . It's the year A.D. 57 and Jerusalem teeters on the brink of revolt against Rome. James, leader of the Jewish Christian community, has an enemy in high places. And two very strange friends . . . Rivka Meyers is a Messianic Jewish archaeologist from California, trapped in first-century Jerusalem by a physics experiment gone horribly wrong. Ari Kazan is her husband, an Israeli physicist slowly coming to grips with his Jewish heritage---and with a man named Jesus he was raised to hate. With no way back to their own century, Rivka and Ari seek their niche in this doomed city of God. Ari applies his knowledge of physics to become an engineer, a man of honor. Rivka feels increasingly isolated in a patriarchal culture that treats women like children. She knows what's coming---siege, famine, fire. At first, her warnings earn her grudging respect as a 'seer woman.' But when one of her predictions misses, the city scorns her as a false prophet. Rivka knows that an illegal trial and execution awaits James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. Can she prevent this disaster? Will James believe her 'premonition'? Or is Ari right that Rivka's meddling in history will only . . . make matters worse?

The Book of Cairo
The Book of Cairo

Author: Ahmed Naji

Publisher: Comma Press

Published: 2019-05-16

Total Pages: 103

ISBN-13: 1912697173

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A corrupt police officer trawls the streets of Cairo on the most important assignment of his career: the answer to the truth of all existence… A young journalist struggles over the obituary of a nightclub dancer… A man slowly loses his mind in one of the city’s new desert developments... There is a saying that, whoever you are, if you come to Cairo you will find a hundred people just like you. For over a thousand years, the city on the banks of the Nile has welcomed travellers from around the world. But in recent years Cairo has also been a stage for expressions of short-lived hope, political disappointments and a violent repression that can barely be written about. These ten short stories showcase some of the most exciting, emerging voices in Egypt, guiding us through one of the world’s largest and most historic cities as it is today – from its slums to its villas, its bars and its balconies, through its infamous traffic. Appearing in English for the first time, these stories evoke the sadness and loss of the modern city, as well as its humour and beauty. Translated by Adam Talib, Raphael Cohen, Basma Ghalayini, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Raph Cormack, Andrew Leber, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Elisabeth Jaquette, Kareem James Abu-Zeid & Yasmine Seale. One of World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2019. '[The Book of Cairo] has no need for camels or pyramids or an exaggeration of whatever the Western eye is looking for. Reading it feels like sitting in a cafe in Cairo with young literary men and women, listening to their stories that dig deep into what Cairo is and is not.' - Asymptote Journal 'Though each story in The Book of Cairo is unique – ten stories by ten writers, translated by ten translators – they feed into one another artfully, like a movie soundtrack, a concept album, or a full novel. The cogs of Cairo turn through this book, and they move faster and more erratically as the pages turn – just as life in Cairo itself does.' - Books and Bao

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens
The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens

Author: John O. Jordan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-06-18

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1107494192

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The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen specially-commissioned chapters by leading international scholars, who together provide diverse but complementary approaches to the full span of Dickens's work, with particular focus on his major fiction. The essays cover the whole range of Dickens's writing, from Sketches by Boz through The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Separate chapters address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider formal features of the novels, including their serial publication and Dickens's distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. Each essay provides guidance to further reading. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory, that will be of interest to scholars and teachers of the novels.

Postcolonial Paris
Postcolonial Paris

Author: Laila Amine

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0299315800

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Expanding the narrow script of what it means to be Parisian, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art made by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.

The Book of Havana
The Book of Havana

Author: Daniel Chavarria

Publisher: Comma Press

Published: 2018-06-21

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1912697041

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When a history teacher decides to throw out an old, threadbare Cuban flag, he doesn’t plan for the air of suspicion that quickly descends on him… A woman’s attempt to register ownership of her family home draws her into a bureaucratic labyrinth that requires a grasp of higher mathematics to fully comprehend… On the day of their graduation, a group of students spend the night drinking around the ‘Fountain of Youth’, ironically celebrating the bright future that doesn’t await them… The stories gathered in this anthology reflect the many complex challenges Havana’s citizens have had to endure as a result of their country’s political isolation – from the hardships of the ‘Special Period’, to the pitfalls of Cuba’s schizophrenic currency system, to the indignities of becoming a cheap tourist destination for well-heeled Westerners. Moving through various moments in its recent history, as well as through different neighbourhoods – from the prefab, Soviet-era maze of Alamar, to the bars and nightclubs of the Malecón and Vedado – these stories also demonstrate the defiance of Havana: surviving decades of economic disappointment with a flair for the comic, the surreal and the fantastical that remains as fresh as the first dreams of revolution. Translated from the Spanish by Orsola Casagrande and Séamas Carraher.