Designed to encourage readers to read and think critically, compassionately, and globally, this comprehensive collection of contemporary writing in English spotlights English as an international literary language. The broad range of genres from some of the world's finest writers, cross diverse gender, generational and ethnic lines. Breadth and quality of essays, memoirs, poems and stories cover such enduring themes as heritage, family, community, identity and autonomy, love and commitment, (post) colonization, the immigrant experience and alienation. For individuals interested in expanding the boarders of their reading to include a showcase of English language literature.
A collection of stories and poems by contemporary writers from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other countries the United States considers enemies that have been translated into English.
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon’s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.
Featuring the work of more than 28 writers from upwards of 20 countries, this collection transports us to the frontiers of twenty-first century literature. In these pages, some of the most accomplished writers in world literature–among them Edwidge Danticat, Ha Jin, Cynthia Ozick, Javier Marias, and Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka, Günter Grass, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Naguib Mahfouz–have stepped forward to introduce us to dazzling literary talents virtually unknown to readers of English. Most of their work–short stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from novels–appears here in English for the first time. The Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman introduces us to a story of extraordinary poise and spiritual intelligence by the Argentinian writer Juan Forn. The Romanian writer Norman Manea shares with us the sexy, sinister, and thrillingly avant garde fiction of his homeland’s leading female novelist. The Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri spotlights the Bengali writer Parashuram, whose hilarious comedy of manners imagines what might have happened if Britain had been colonized by Bengal. And Roberto Calasso writes admiringly of his fellow Italian Giorgio Manganelli, whose piece celebrates the Indian city of Madurai. Every piece here–be it from the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean–is a discovery, a colorful thread in a global weave of literary exchange. Edited by Samantha Schnee, Alane Salierno Mason, and Dedi Felman
A long-awaited corrective to the controversial idea of world literature, from a major voice in the field. Katerina Clark charts interwar efforts by Soviet, European, and Asian leftist writers to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that would overcome national, cultural, and linguistic differences in the name of an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and later antifascist aesthetic. At the heart of this story stands the literary arm of the Communist International, or Comintern, anchored in Moscow but reaching Baku, Beijing, London, and parts in between. Its mission attracted diverse networks of writers who hailed from Turkey, Iran, India, and China, as well as the Soviet Union and Europe. Between 1919 and 1943, they sought to establish a new world literature to rival the capitalist republic of Western letters. Eurasia without Borders revises standard accounts of global twentieth-century literary movements. The Eurocentric discourse of world literature focuses on transatlantic interactions, largely omitting the international left and its Asian members. Meanwhile, postcolonial studies have overlooked the socialist-aligned world in favor of the clash between Western European imperialism and subaltern resistance. Clark provides the missing pieces, illuminating a distinctive literature that sought to fuse European and vernacular Asian traditions in the name of a post-imperialist culture. Socialist literary internationalism was not without serious problems, and at times it succumbed to an orientalist aesthetic that rivaled any coming from Europe. Its history is marked by both promise and tragedy. With clear-eyed honesty, Clark traces the limits, compromises, and achievements of an ambitious cultural collaboration whose resonances in later movements can no longer be ignored.
In Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times, Lynn Z. Bloom presents groundbreaking research on the nature of essays and on the political, philosophical, ethical, and pragmatic considerations that influence how we read, write, and teach them in times troubled by terrorism, transgressive students, and uses and abuses of the Internet. Writers Without Borders reinforces Bloom’s reputation for presenting innovative and sophisticated research with a writer’s art and a teacher’s heart. Each of the eleven essays addresses in its own way the essay itself as one way to live and learn with others.
This book asks what it takes for people to encounter one another ethically when practices, worldviews and imaginations clash. It engages over 40 contributors across geographies, disciplines, art forms and practices in a conversation that touches on topics ranging from the climate catastrophe to the disintegration of the welfare state and the erasure of certain bodies from public spaces. It is concerned with how these ‘big’ questions play out in ‘small’ everyday encounters in classrooms, rehearsal rooms, arts projects, charity events or city markets. The book’s polyphonic text does not present answers to its central questions in the way a typical research publication might do. Instead, it creates a flow and invites the reader to join a conversation. By refusing to deliver an argument, the book opens new possibilities for relating to others in the academy and arts. This book is open access under a CC BY ND licence.
Writing Language, Culture and Development has 2 essays, 6 stories, 63 poems, 2 plays, and 50 translations into 13 languages; Chinese, Japanese, Nepalese, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Kiswahili, Shona, Hausa, Idoma, Igbo, Akan Twi, and of course, English, from Authors and poets who reside in these among other countries: South Africa, Japan, Vietnam, Nepal, China, Korea, Rusia, Tunisia, Nigeria, India, USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Kenya, and the UK, who are connected to these two continents, Asia and Africa. Nurturing South-South interactions and interlocutions, spiritually is an open ended discourse and praxis. It is envisioned that this ground-breaking idea will serve as a testament to future cooperations between the two continents. It is hoped Africa and Asia can use their competencies, i.e., human capital, culture, and langauges, histories, and deconstructionist agendas, to create developmental competences and this book highlights and explore a number of pathways that creatives of the two lands can explore and exploit as they march into a future of Weltliteratur. The cast and nature of the book and its content is a product of thought, imagination and environment. We invite you to it’s offerings that individually, and collectively, accentuate our allied artistic commitment to the Humanities as an arena of thought on identities, languages, cultures, histories and epistemologies of postcolonial posture.
In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature emerging from artists increased movement and cultural flows spawned by globalization. This "transcultural" literature is produced by authors who write across cultural and national boundaries and who transcend in their lives and creative production the borders of a single culture. Dagninos book contains a creative rendition of interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writersInez Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija Trojanowand a critical exegesis reflecting on thematical, critical, and stylistical aspects. By studying the selected authors corpus of work, life experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the implicit, often subconscious, process of cultural and imaginative metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their fictionalized characters beyond ethnic, national, racial, or religious loci of identity and identity formation. Drawing on the theoretical framework of comparative cultural studies, she offers insight into transcultural writing related to belonging, hybridity, cultural errancy, the "Other," worldviews, translingualism, deterritorialization, neonomadism, as well as genre, thematic patterns, and narrative techniques. Dagnino also outlines the implications of transcultural writing within the wider context of world literature (s) and identifies some of the main traits that characterize transcultural novels.
