Boats on Land
Boats on Land

Author: Janice Pariat

Publisher: Random House India

Published: 2012-10-05

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 8184003390

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Boats on Land is a unique way of looking at India’s northeast and its people against a larger historical canvas—the early days of the British Raj, the World Wars, conversions to Christianity, and the missionaries. This is a world in which the everyday is infused with folklore and a deep belief in the supernatural. Here, a girl dreams of being a firebird. An artist watches souls turn into trees. A man shape-shifts into a tiger. Another is bewitched by water fairies. Political struggles and social unrest interweave with fireside tales and age-old superstitions. Boats on Land quietly captures our fragile and awkward place in the world.

Ethnic Modernisms
Ethnic Modernisms

Author: D. Konzett

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2003-02-06

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9781349387465

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This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.

A Woman in the Crossfire
A Woman in the Crossfire

Author: Samar Yazbek

Publisher: Haus Publishing

Published: 2012-08-28

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1908323140

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A well-known novelist and journalist from the coastal city of Jableh, Samar Yazbek witnessed the beginning four months of the uprising first-hand and actively participated in a variety of public actions and budding social movements. Throughout this period she kept a diary of personal reflections on, and observations of, this historic time. Because of the outspoken views she published in print and online, Yazbek quickly attracted the attention and fury of the regime, vicious rumours started to spread about her disloyalty to the homeland and the Alawite community to which she belongs. The lyrical narrative describes her struggle to protect herself and her young daughter, even as her activism propels her into a horrifying labyrinth of insecurity after she is forced into living on the run and detained multiple times, excluded from the Alawite community and renounced by her family, her hometown and even her childhood friends. With rare empathy and journalistic prowess Samar Yazbek compiled oral testimonies from ordinary Syrians all over the country. Filled with snapshots of exhilarating hope and horrifying atrocities, she offers us a wholly unique perspective on the Syrian uprising. Hers is a modest yet powerful testament to the strength and commitment of countless unnamed Syrians who have united to fight for their freedom. These diaries will inspire all those who read them, and challenge the world to look anew at the trials and tribulations of the Syrian uprising.

Memory and Amnesia
Memory and Amnesia

Author: Paloma Aguilar Fernández

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9781571817570

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Using a rich variety of sources, this book explores how the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War influenced the transition to democracy in Spain after Franco's death in 1975.

Blindly
Blindly

Author: Claudio Magris

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300185362

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Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread." Claudio Magris, one of Europe's leading authors and cultural philosophers, offers as narrator of Blindly a madman. Yes, but a pazzo lucido, a lucid madman, a single narrative voice populated by various characters. He is Jorgen Jorgenson, the nineteenth-century adventurer who became king of Iceland but was condemned to forced labor in the Antipodes. He is also Comrade Cippico, a militant anti-communist, imprisoned for years in Tito's gulag on the island Goli Otok. And he is the many partisans, prisoners, sailors, and stowaways who have encountered the perils of travel, war, and adventure. In a shifting choral monologue—part confession, part psychiatric session—a man remembers (invents, falsifies, hides, screams out) his life, a voyage into the nether regions of history, and in particular the twentieth century.

In the Light of What We Know
In the Light of What We Know

Author: Zia Haider Rahman

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2014-04-22

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0374710082

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A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope--from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton--and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world--and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.

The Line
The Line

Author: Cynthia Cockburn

Publisher: Zed Books

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781842774212

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As Cyprus prepares to join the EU in 2004, the pressure is on to resolve the long-standing partition between the Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Cypriot Republic of North Cyprus.

Italian Identities
Italian Identities

Author: Diana Glenn

Publisher: Troubador Publishing

Published: 2020-03-28

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781838594473

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This book of essays explores the notion of Italian identity in a wide range of forms, including linguistic identity and unifying concepts evident in Dante's Commedia, environmental studies and issues related to gender and sexuality viewed through the lens of Italian literature, hybrid identity in a migration context, and regional identity with a particular focus on Sicily.