The Homeland actress’s “recollections of her unconventional youth in war-torn Beirut are heartbreaking yet humorous . . . in this unique” memoir (Publishers Weekly). Raised in 1970s Lebanon on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. She spent her adolescence defying death in Beirut nightclubs as bombs fell across the city. The more oppressive the country became, the more drugs and anonymous sex she had, fueling the resentment directed at her daily by the same men who would spend the night with her. As the war dies down, she begins to incur the consequences of her lifestyle. On his deathbed, her father’s last wish is for his favorite song, “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, to be played at his funeral instead of the traditional suras of the Koran. When she does just that, the final act of defiance elicits a catastrophic response from her surviving family members. In this dramatic true story, Darina Al-Joundi is defiantly passionate about living her life as a liberated woman, even if it means leaving everyone and everything behind in this “beautifully taut and relentlessly unemotional” memoir (Kirkus).
On the evening of her father's funeral, while his family recites suras from the Koran, Noun interrupts the ceremony. Faithful to the memory of her father, a writer and journalist, a freedom fighter, she decides to put an end to this memorial and to make sure that her father's last wishes are respected: to be buried to a jazz tune. Locked up with the dead body, Noun looks back on her experience in Lebanon. She reminisces about the war, the straitjacket of religion, the weight of prejudice and her struggle against an all-powerful male society that forbids women to speak. Le Jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter (The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing) was an instant sensation when it was first performed as a one-woman play at the Avignon festival in July 2007: it sold out at every performance and resulted in multiple runs in Paris and throughout France.
This introductory text explores the gendered history of the modern Middle East, from the eighteenth century to the present, studying the various ways in which gender has defined the region and shaped relations in the modern era. The book captures three aspects of change simultaneously: the events that mark the “modern” Middle East, women’s encounters with the transition to modernity and gendered responses to modernity. It contains both new fieldwork and a synthesis of secondary scholarship that highlight the role of gender in the modernization of Egypt, Turkey, Iran, the Levant and the Persian Gulf states. Chapters are organized chronologically to chart the rapid developments of the modern era, but each chapter also stands on its own, with coverage of masculinity and femininity, sexuality, marriage and the family, labor and women’s contributions to Arab Spring uprisings. Through this comprehensive account, the book pushes back on stereotypes that the Middle East is an ahistorical region and that women have not been vital actors in the process of change. Richly illustrated and accessible for a variety of readers, History, Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in gender studies and Middle Eastern history.
Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein uses an archive of Simone’s performances, images, and writings to examine the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries. With her covers of George Harrison, the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and others, Simone explored and claimed the power and perspective that come with race and gender privilege. Looking at examples from Simone’s four-decade genre-bending career—from songbook standards, jazz, and pop to folk, junkanoo, and reggae—and at her work’s many uptakes and afterlives, Stein mobilizes the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to build a black feminist history with and for this multifaceted performing artist.
STARS ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE Premiere Issue. December 2013 (200 Pages). Commercial/economy edition. AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE. Other edition: Deluxe Edition in full colors, printed on glossy heavy stock paper. Published monthly by Times Square Press, New York. Editor-in-Chief: Maximillien de Lafayette. Website: http: //timessquarepress.com/ On the Cover: Diva Dominique Hourani, and Alexandra Sokollof, Natasha Blasick, Patrice Cole, Patti Negri, Kristen Dalton. Also available in economy edition. The magazine of international superstars, artists, screen goddesses, filmmakers, actors/actresses, music, dance, theater, cinema, performing arts, fashion, authors, glamour, beauty, style and elegance. Contact Carla C. at [email protected]
INTERNATIONAL DELUXE EDITION: STARS ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE Premiere Issue. December 2013 (200 Pages). AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE. In full colors, printed on glossy heavy stock paper. Published monthly by Times Square Press, New York. Editor-in-Chief: Maximillien de Lafayette. Website: http://timessquarepress.com/ On the Cover: Star Natasha Blasick. Also available in economy edition. The magazine of international superstars, artists, screen goddesses, filmmakers, actors/actresses, music, dance, theater, cinema, performing arts, fashion, authors, glamour, beauty, style and elegance. Contact Carla C. at [email protected]
STARS ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE Premiere Issue. International Commercial Edition. December 2013 (200 Pages). Economy edition. AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE. Other edition: Deluxe Edition in full colors, printed on glossy heavy stock paper. Published monthly by Times Square Press, New York. Editor-in-Chief: Maximillien de Lafayette. Website: http: //timessquarepress.com/ On the Cover: Superstar Natasha Blasick. The magazine of international superstars, artists, screen goddesses, filmmakers, actors/actresses, music, dance, theater, cinema, performing arts, fashion, authors, glamour, beauty, style and elegance. Contact Carla C. at [email protected]
A moving account of life as a political prisoner in post-revolutionary Iran from the acclaimed Iranian author of Women Without Men. Shahrnush Parsipur was a successful writer and television producer in her native Iran until the Revolution of 1979. Soon after seizing control, the Islamist government began detaining its citizens—and Parsipur found herself incarcerated without charges. Kissing the Sword captures the surreal experience of serving time as a political prisoner and witnessing the systematic elimination of opposition to fundamentalist power. It is a harrowing narrative filled with both horror and humor: nights blasted by machine gun fire as detainees are summarily executed, days spent debating prison officials on whether the Quran demands that women be covered. Parsipur, one of modern Iran’s great literary voices, mines her painful life experiences to deliver an urgent call for the most basic of human rights: the freedom of expression. “Parsipur makes a stylishly original contribution to modern feminist literature.” —Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis “Stands as a powerful testament to not only the devastations of an era, but to the integrity and courage of an extraordinary woman.” —Kirkus Reviews “Parsipur’s memoir is a powerful tale of a writer’s struggle to survive the worst cases of atrocities and injustice with grace and compassion. A terribly dark but truly illuminating narrative; Parsipur forces the reader to question human nature and resilience.” —Shirin Neshat, artist
In 2005 literary and film critic Edward Turk immersed himself in New York City’s ACT FRENCH festival, a bold effort to enhance American contact with the contemporary French stage. This dizzying crash course on numerous aspects of current French theatre paved the way for six months of theatregoing in Paris and a month’s sojourn at the 2006 Avignon Festival. In French Theatre Today he turns his yearlong involvement with this rich topic into an accessible, intelligent, and comprehensive overview of contemporary French theatre. Situating many of the nearly 150 stage pieces he attended within contexts and timeframes that stretch backward and forward over a number of years, he reveals French theatre during the first decade of the twenty-first century to be remarkably vital, inclined toward both innovation and concern for its audience, and as open to international influence as it is respectful of national tradition. French Theatre Today provides a seamless mix of critical analysis with lively description, theoretical considerations with reflexive remarks by the theatremakers themselves, and matters of current French and American cultural politics. In the first part, “New York,” Turk offers close-ups of French theatre works singled out during the ACT FRENCH festival for their presumed attractiveness to American audiences and critics. The second part, “Paris,” depicts a more expansive range of French theatre pieces as they play out on their own soil. In the third part, “Avignon,” Turk captures the subject within a more fluid context that is, most interestingly, both eminently French and resolutely international. The Paris and Avignon chapters contain valuable and well-informed contextual and background information as well as descriptions of the milieus of the Avignon Festival and the various neighborhoods in Paris where he attended performances, information that readers cannot find easily elsewhere. Finally, in the spirit of inclusiveness that characterizes so much new French theatre and to give a representative account of his own experiences as a spectator, Turk rounds out his survey with observations on Paris’s lively opera scene and France’s wealth of circus entertainments, both traditional and newly envisioned. With his shrewd assessments of contemporary French theatre, Turk conveys an excitement and an affection for his topic destined to arouse similar responses in his readers. His book’s freshness and openness will reward theatre enthusiasts who are curious about an aspect of French culture that is inadequately known in this country, veteran scholars and students of contemporary world theatre, and those American theatre professionals who have the ultimate authority and good fortune to determine which new French works will reach audiences on these shores.
“I had a dream that women, all women, will hold their heads high, that women will work, that in their eyes we will no longer see fear or defeat or humiliation. That women will never again be shackled by society, or by circumstance, or by men. Instead we will see in the eyes of every woman a person fully in control of herself, and mistress of her own destiny.” Cairo, 1920. In the cafés and literary salons, the great minds of the Arab renaissance meet and share ideas. Among them is May Ziadeh, pioneer of the Arab feminist movement and the great love of Khalil Gibran’s life. Intense and talented, May is celebrated by the greatest writers and thinkers of Cairo’s literary world, who flock to her famous salon. Yet when a series of personal losses leave her vulnerable to plots against her, she is abandoned by those she believed would protect her. Stripped of her everything and imprisoned against her will, May is left fighting for the most basic right: freedom. In Prisoner of the Levant, Darina Al Joundi offers a moving account of May Ziadeh’s desire for emancipation and enlightenment, and an indictment of a world that does not allow women to be free.
