Shop Categories
- Reed, Kit
- Estates & Trusts
- Vinge, Vernor
- Joyce, Graham
- Borland Delphi
- General
- Composers
- Hardcover
- Balthus
- Weis, Margaret
- Wagner, Richard
- Leiber, Fritz
- Irving, Washington
- Midwifery
- Dominica
- Europe
- Vegan
- General
- Vargas Llosa, Mario
- Gissing, George
- Theology
- General
- Weiss, David Cody
- Biostatistics
- Microbiology
- Brett, Simon
- Analytic Geometry
- Dunn, Carola
- Business Life
- Harris, Charlaine
Books on : Literature & Fiction : History & Criticism : African
-
Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, but until now there has not been a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. Acclaimed by critics and scholars, Stephen Mitchell's version allows us to enter an ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is.
-
Salih's shocking and beautiful novel reveals much about the people on each side of a cultural divide. A brilliant Sudanese student takes his mix of anger and obsession with the West to London, where he has affairs with women who are similarly obsessed with the mysterious East. Life, ecstasy, and death share the same moment in time. First published in Arabic in 1969.
Tayeb Salih was born in 1929 in the Northern Province of Sudan. He studied at the University of Khartoum and London University and has served as head of drama in the BBC s Arabic Service and director-general of information for the state of Qatar.
Denys Johnson-Davies has published more than twenty-five volumes of stories, novels, plays, and poetry translated from modern Arabic literature. He lives in Cairo.
-
-
Volume I of the masterful Cairo Trilogy. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.
-
-
"All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face. But because I am a woman I have never had the courage to lift my hand. And because I am a prostitute, I hid my fear under layers of make-up." --Excerpt
-
At once an intimate autobiography and a collective memory of the Palestinian people, Mahmoud Darwish's interlinked poems are collective cries, songs, and glimpses of the human condition. The collection-widely considered his chef-d'oeuvre-is a poetry of myth and history, of exile and suspended time, of an identity bound to the Arabic language and his displaced people. Darwish's poems-specific and symbolic, simple and profound-are historical glimpses, existential queries, chants of pain and injustice of a people separated from their land.
-
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
In this beguiling new novel, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in the United States, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--and the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.
-
Ngugi describes this book as "a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism and in the teaching of literature. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures...."
-
-
The longing stretch toward the infinite...the reluctant embrace of the temporal. This is the eternal lot of mankind. This is The Epic of Gilgamesh. Our revised 2nd edition of mankind's first epic features a lucid historical and cultural introduction by Dr. Biggs, a new interpretive essay on the themes of Gilgamesh by James G. Keenan and their echoes in other literature, and ancient world and original illustrations.Though The Epic of Gilgamesh exists in several editions, this version has been undertaken with a very specific intent -- to remain faithful to the source material while attempting to convey the poetic scope of a work that is both lusty and tender and that retains the ability to arouse compassion and empathy in all who follow Gilgamesh on his journey. This edition aims to reanimate the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu for modern readers, bringing it new life through indelible poetic images.
For centuries the beginnings of the literary history of the West were defined by the Hebrew Bible--what most people call the Old Testament--and Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. These texts were once naively imagined to have come about in splendid isolation either as a miracle of divine creation or the spontaneous combustion of the ?Greek genius.? The mighty stream of words down over the millennia to our own time are so many generations of offspring still somehow beholden to their initial begetters. Thus do we construe Western Literature.
- from Ancient Epic Poetry Chapter 8: Gilgamesh
Charles Rowan Beye
Special Features
* Story Commentary
* Historical Notes
* Illustrated Introduction
* 15 Original Woodcut Prints
* 18 PhotosAlso available:
Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil With A Chapter On The Gilgamesh Poems - ISBN 0865166072
The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic - ISBN 0865165467
-
-
Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable.
This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo.
If, in the words of Audre Lorde, poetry “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,” these versesâsome originally written in toothpaste, others scratched onto foam drinking cups with pebbles and furtively handed to attorneysâare the most basic form of the art.
Death Poem by Jumah al Dossari
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the "protectors or peace."
Jumah al Dossari is a thirty-three-year old Bahraini who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.
-
Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, and Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most renowned and widely-read African novel in the global literary canon. Translated into close to sixty languages, Things Fall Apart is the novel that inaugurated the long and continuing tradition of postcolonial inquiry into the problematic relations between the West and the countries of the Third World that were once European colonies.
This collection explores the artistic, multicultural, and global significance of Things Fall Apart from a variety of critical perspectives. The essays selected for this casebook represent the most important and well-established critical work written on the novel to date. This volume also contains an editor's introduction, an interview with Chinua Achebe, and suggestions for further reading.
-
-
Sunjata started life as a gluttonous and slow-witted child but went on to become a celebrated warrior who defeated the Susu overlords and founded the great Mali empire in the early thirteenth century. Equally crucial in the conquest was the role of his sister Nene Faamaga, who lured his archenemy, Sumanguru, into revealing the secret magical powers that made him invulnerable.
These stories remain central to the culture of the Mande-speaking peoples. This book brings together translations of live performances by two leading Gambian jalis (or bards). Where Banna Kanute's exciting version is all about violent action, supernatural forces, and the struggle for mastery, Bamba Suso uses far more dialogue to reveal his insight into human relationships. A map, notes, and lists of the characters (many of whom have several names) help nonspecialists gain access to one of the major epic oral traditions of Africa.
-
-
A renowned Nobel Prize-winning novelist refashions the classic tales of Scheherazade in his own imaginative, spellbinding style. Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters.
-
First published in 1973 - and followed by Volume II in 1976 and Volume III in 1980 - this anthology has assumed classic status in the field of Egyptology and portrays the remarkable evolution of the literary forms of one of the world's earliest civilizations.
Volume I outlines the early and gradual evolution of Egyptian literary genres, including biographical and historical inscriptions carved on stone, the various classes of literary works written with pen on papyrus, and the mortuary literature that focuses on life after death. Introduced with a new foreword by Antonio Loprieno.
Volume II shows the culmination of these literary genres within the single period known as the New Kingdom (1550-1080 B.C.). With a new foreword by Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert.
Volume III spans the last millennium of Pharaonic civilization, from the tenth century B.C. to the beginning of the Christian era. With a new foreword by Joseph G. Manning.
-
This is one of the best-known plays by Africa's major dramatist, Wole Soyinka. It is set in the Yoruba village of Ilunjinle. The main characters are Sidi (the Jewel), 'a true village belle' and Baroka (the Lion), the crafty and powerful Bale of the village, Lakunle, the young teacher, influenced by western ways, and Sadiku, the eldest of Baroka's wives. How the Lion hunts the Jewel is the theme of this ribald comedy.