Product Description: In 1941, Theo Coster was a student at the Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum, 1 in a class of 28 Jewish children that the Nazis had segregated from the rest of the Dutch population. Among Theo's fellow students was a young Anne Frank, whose diary would later become one of the most important documents of the Holocaust...read more

Product Description: In this innovative and skillful study, Hélène Tissières investigates the "circulations" or transmigrations at work among multiple francophone African cultural forms, ranging geographically between North and sub-Saharan Africa, culturally between words and silences, verbally between spoken and written language, and aesthetically between textual and visual images...read more

Product Description: The Past Ahead is the story of the destinies of two people after their experiences of the genocide in Rwanda. Isaro is orphaned, exiled, and now returned to her native country. Niko is a character in a novel that Isaro writes to help her understand her country's recent horrific past...read more

Product Description: Raised on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux in 1970s Lebanon, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. As the bombs fell, she lived an adolescence of excess and transgression, defying death in nightclubs...read more

Product Description: Electra vs Oedipus explores the deeply complex and often turbulent relationship between mothers and daughters. In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s conviction that the father is the central figure, the book puts forward the notion that women are in fact far more (pre)occupied with their mother...read more

The preeminent Afghan poet of the twentieth century, Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, has here collected the songs of anonymous Pashtun women from the time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.These landays consist of two-line verses of nine and thirteen syllables. Their brevity and rhythm are meant to catch the ear. Village women improvise landays as they gather water from springs and when they dance and sing at weddings, with the most resonant of them claimed by their collective memory.As part of an oral tradition, these poems avoid the complex, mystical, and abstract forms of their cultural canon. There is no aspiration whatsoever toward an unfathomable and incommunicable heaven, nor devotion to the lord, nor praise for an absolute master, nor any Adonis. To the contrary these poems are songs of the earth.Here the active voice of the Afghan woman affirms simple pleasures and bemoans widespread suffering. The poems celebrate nature, mountains, rivers, dawn, and night's magnetic space. They are songs of war and honor, shame and love, death and beauty.

Product Description: Christians in Palestine is journalist Jean Rolin’s highly personalized account of the lives of the Arab Christian population in Palestine. Set on the eve of the Iraq War, when Rolin visited Bethlehem, Ramallah and Jerusalem, this detailed portrayal reveals a people torn between their religious beliefs and their Arab patriotism, loathe to criticize their Muslim leaders and eager to blame their misfortune on the Israelis...read more

Assia Djebar, the most distinguished woman writer to emerge from the Arab world—and a top candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature—wrote Children of the New World following her own involvement in the Algerian resistance to colonial French rule. This long-overdue first English translation coincides with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Algerian war and with the growing insurgency in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.Like the classic film The Battle of Algiers—enjoying renewed interest in the face of world events—Djebar’s novel sheds light on current world conflicts as it reveals a determined Arab insurgency against foreign occupation, from the inside out.However, Djebar focuses on the experiences of women drawn into the politics of resistance. Her novel recounts the interlocking lives of women in a rural Algerian town who find themselves joined in solidarity and empower each other to engage in the fight for independence. Narrating the resistance movement from a variety of perspectives—from those of traditional wives to liberated students to political organizers—Djebar powerfully depicts the circumstances that drive oppressed communities to violence and at the same time movingly reveals the tragic costs of war.Renowned writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar has authored several novels, including the critically lauded So Vast the Prison and Algerian White. She has won several awards for her work, including the prestigious International Neustadt Prize for Literature. Born and raised in Algeria, Djebar is currently the Silver Chair of French at New York University.Marjolijn de Jager, PhD, is the translator of Djebar’s Algerian White and Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, which was honored by the American Literary Translators Association. She teaches at the Center for Foreign Languages and Translation at New York University.

Product Description: "Walking Heads" refers to individuals especially entrenched inside their heads, without any instinctive contact with the rest of the body. Their childhoods were spent in situations difficult to endure and from which there was no escape...read more

Product Description: Helene de Beauvoir, a painter, grew up in the shadow of her extraordinary older sister, Simone. But the remarkable extent to which their relationship shaped both their lives has been overlooked until now. In this astonishingly intimate biography, the reader learns not only about their close relationship and artistic influence on one another, but also about the jealousy, condescension, and rivalry that plagued them...read more

Product Description: Set in the 1960s in Paris' Jewish quarter, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran is about a troubled Jewish boy, Moses, or Momo, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a solitary Muslim shopkeeper named Monsieur Ibrahim...read more

Product Description: Book by Antaki, Myriam

The author uses the death of three friends to meditate on the history of modern Algeria, offering readers and inside look at the civil war and strife that currently threatens the nation. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The renowned author of The Last Summer of Reason achieved his greatest acclaim for this elegant, chilling novel, winning France's prestigious Prix Mditerrane in 1991. The Watchers is a politically and morally resonant fable of malevolent bureaucracy, thoughtless fundamentalism, and the danger of sacrificing liberty in the name of patriotism...read more

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Product Description: This unique anthology probes deeply into the diverse experiences of French and native Algerian, male and female, rich and poor, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian people who, through their writing, congregate here to recount personal tales of growing up in this region in North Africa, experiences that bind them as humans...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Follows Loukoum and his family, North African immigrants in Paris, as they interact with each other, their immediate surroundings, and the authorities of Paris

Product Description: Book by Mudimbe, V.Y.