The Children of the Ghetto: I
The Children of the Ghetto: I

Author: Elias Khoury

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 1939810140

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Lit by the sublime beauty and tragedy of classical Arabic poetry, a Palestinian falafel seller in New York sets out to shape fragments of his family history Weaving history, memory, and poetry, this unforgettable novel—and the 1st book in a trilogy—provides a sprawling memorial to the Nakba and the strangled lives left in its wake. Long exiled in New York, Palestinian ex-pat Adam Dannoun thought he knew himself. But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changes everything. It is when Adam encounters his former teacher that Adam discovers the story he must tell. Ma’moun’s testimony brings Adam back to the first years of his life in the ghetto of Lydia, in Palestine, where his family endured thirst, hunger, and terror in the aftermath of unspeakable horror. With unmatched literary craft and empathy, Khoury peels away layers of lost stories and repressed memories to unveil Adam’s story. Oscillating between two narrators—the self-reflexive "Elias Khoury" and Adam himself—Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam engages real (and invented) scholarly texts, Khoury’s own work, and Adam’s lost notebooks in an intertextual account of a life shadowed by atrocity.

Russian Folktales
Russian Folktales

Author: A. N. Afanasyev

Publisher: Standard Ebooks

Published: 2024-08-18T03:14:13Z

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13:

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Russian Folktales (also translated as Russian Fairy Tales) is a collection of folktales in the Russian language, collected and edited in the 19th century by folklorist A. N. Afanasyev. Despite the title, these stories are not just Russian ones, but are also folk and fairy tales told by people from many eastern Slavic-speaking regions like Belarus and Ukraine. The stories in this collection focus both on pre-Christian elements like spirits and pagan entities, and Christian elements like saints, angels, and apostles, who appear as characters in some of the stories. References to God and liturgical practices abound. Although traditional tales like these don’t form a uniform and consistent corpus, some stock characters appear in several stories, like Koshchéy the Deathless, Iván Tsárevich, and Bába Yága. This edition is based on the 1916 translation by Leonard A. Magnus, who curated a selection of stories from Afanasyev’s original Russian edition. The Russian edition is much larger, with over five hundred stories in total. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

The Warrior Women of Islam
The Warrior Women of Islam

Author: Remke Kruk

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0857736493

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Colloquial Arabic storytelling is most commonly associated with The Thousandvand One Nights. But few people are aware of a much larger corpus of narrative texts known as popular epic. These heroic romantic tales, originating in the Middle Ages, form vast cycles of adventure stories whose most remarkable feature is their portrayal of powerful and memorable women. Wildly appreciated by medieval audiences, and spread by professional storytellers throughout the cities of the Muslim world, these fictions were printed and reprinted over the centuries and comprise a vital part of Arab culture. Yet virtually none are available in translation, and so remain almost unknown to a non-Arab public. Remke Kruk at last makes these neglected romances available to a Western audience. She recounts the story of Princess Dhat al-Himma, brave and undefeated leader of the Muslim army in its wars against the Byzantines; of Ghamra, brought up as a boy to become a fearless leader of men; and of cool-headed Qannasa, raiding from her mountain fortress to capture and seduce her enemies before putting them pitilessly to the sword. The Warrior Women of Islam puts a bold new complexion on gender roles and the wider perception of women in the Middle East.