Tale of Genji
"Those who wish to deepen their acquaintance with Murasaki's wondrous world will certainly find Puette's guide most helpful." --The Japan Times This is the most complete reader's guide available on Japan's highly revered novel, the eleventh-century classic, The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, referred to by Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata as the "highest pinnacle of Japanese literature." Written specifically to accompany the translation of the work by Arthur Waley and Edward G. Seidensticker, this guide offers detailed summaries and thematic commentaries, as well as cross-referenced notes on the novel's many characters. It also charts the essential progress of The Tale of Genji and introduces the reader to the more subtle complexities, literary devices, and conventions of Lady Murasaki's Heian Japan. No longer does the reader have to try and guess the novel's cultural and historical milieu. The author presents brief, illustrated essays on historical, philosophical, and cultural features of the novel, and discusses such relevant aspects as the balance between the tenets of Shintoism and Buddhism, the pervasive concepts of karma in human relationships, and the poetic aspects of aware. Both general readers and literature students will find the background information contained in this "companion" indispensable to their reading and interpretation of this complex novel.
Finding a Form
"No one is better than William H. Gass at communicating the sublime and rapturous excitement of reading." Washington Post
The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940
This book analyses how a language became the instrument with which the contours of a new nation were traced. To a colonized people agitating for freedom, a people divided by many languages, cultures and religions, the one language--one nation concept of nationalism proved to be both powerful and seductive. In polyphonic India, however, such a single 'national' language had to be created, its power established. Most nineteenth-century Hindi intellectuals believed the chosen language to be the 'Hindu' Hindi, not the 'Islamic' Hindustani or Urdu nor any other prominent language like Bengali. Orsini shows how early twentieth-century discourses on language, literature, women, history, and politics form the core of the Hindi culture that exist today. She also recovers the many voices, written out of history, which were critical to the national Hindi project. With its depth and scope of research and thinking, this book will be crucial for any scholar engaging in the issues of nationalism, religion, language, and literature that Orsini so ably weaves together and scrutinizes here.
Tales from the Bazaars of Arabia
A goldsmith's daughter who eludes the Prince of Darkness, three wandering brothers born from a walnut tree, the Princess of Fantasistan, the case of the Shah's lost ruby ring, the leopard and the Sultan's emissary, the Cook and the Unforgettable Sneeze...These are just some of the enchanting stories described in "Tales from the Bazaars of Arabia", a collection of classic folktales gathered from Arabia, Afghanistan, Persia and Turkey. Each story is alive with vivid characters - beggars and kings, merchants, witches and djinns - and threaded with universal motifs of fantasy and magic, fate and karma, good and evil. With spirit and passion, Amina Shah here illuminates the exoticism of bygone worlds and resurrects the memories and traditions of some of the greatest storytelling cultures in the world.
The Seine Was Red
Le簿la Sebbar's novel recounts an event in French history that has been hidden for many years. Toward the end of the Algerian war, the FLN, an Algerian nationalist party, organized a demonstration in Paris to oppose a curfew imposed upon Algerians in France. About 30,000 Algerians gathered peacefully, but the protest was brutally suppressed by the Paris police. Between 50 and 200 Algerians were killed and their bodies were thrown into the Seine. This incident provides the background for a more intimate look into the history of violence between France and Algeria. Following three young protagonists--one French, one Algerian, and one French national of Algerian descent--Sebbar takes readers on a journey of discovery and comprehension. Mildred Mortimer's impressive translation conveys the power of Sebbar's words in English and allows English-speaking readers an opportunity to understand the complex relationship between past and present, metropole and colony, immigrant and citizen, that lies at the heart of this acclaimed novel.
Santa Claus in Baghdad
What is it like to be a young person in the Arab world today? This lively collection of eight short stories about Arab teenagers living in Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and a Palestinian refugee camp engagingly depicts young people's experiences growing up in the Middle East. The characters, drawn from urban and rural settings and from different classes as well as a mix of countries, confront situations involving friends, family, teachers, and society at large. Along with some specifically Middle Eastern issues, such as strife in Iraq, the hardships of life in a Palestinian refugee camp, and honor crimes, the young people deal with more familiar concerns such as loyalty to friends, overcoming personal insecurities, dreams of a future career, and coping with divorcing parents. Coming of age in a complicated world, they meet life with courage, determination, and, not least of all, humor. With accompanying notes that provide contextual information, Santa Claus in Baghdad brings a fresh perspective to youth literature about the Arab world.
The Mahfouz Dialogs
The Mahfouz Dialogs records the memories, views, and jokes of Naguib Mahfouz on subjects ranging from politics to the relationship between his novels and his life, as delivered to intimate friends at a series of informal meetings stretching out over almost half a century. Mahfouz was a pivotal figure not only in world literature (through being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win a mass audience), but also in his own society, where he vastly enhanced the image of the writer in the eyes of the public and encapsulated--as the victim of a savage attack on his life by an Islamist in 1994--the struggle between pluralism, tolerance, and secularism on the one hand and extremist Islam. Moderated by Gamal al-Ghitani, a writer of a younger generation who shared a common background with Mahfouz (al-Ghitani also grew up in medieval Cairo) and felt a vast personal empathy for the writer despite their sometimes different views, these exchanges throw new light on Mahfouz's life, the creation of his novels, and literary Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.
Lafcadio Hearn's Japan
This collection of writings from Lafcadio Hearn paints a rare and fascinating picture of pre-modern Japan. Over a century after his death, author, translator, and educator Lafcadio Hearn remains one of the best-known Westerners ever to make Japan his home. His prolific writings on things Japanese were instrumental in introducing Japanese culture to the West. In this masterful anthology, Donald Richie shows that Hearn was a reliable and enthusiastic observer who faithfully recorded detailed accounts of the people, customs, and culture of late 19th-century Japan. Opening and closing with excerpts from Hearn's final books, Richie's astute selection from among "over 4,000 printed pages" also reveals Hearn's later, more sober and reflective attitudes to the things that he observed and wrote about. Part One, "The Land," chronicles Hearn's early years when he wrote primarily about the appearance of his adopted home. Part Two, "The People," records the author's later years when he came to terms with the Japanese people themselves. The 18 writings include: The Chief City of the Province of the GodsThree Popular BalladsIn the Cave of the Children's GhostsBits of Life and DeathA Street SingerKimikoOn A Bridge Through Lafcadio Hearn's Japan, discover turn-of-the-century Japan through the eyes of a talented and eloquent observer.
Autumn Wind and Other Stories
Spanning 60 years of 20th century Japanese literature, this anthology covers Japan's growth from a more traditional country into a distinctly modern one. Most of these stories had not been previously translated into English, opening up a vast new literary canon to Western readers. Award-winning translation Lane Dunlop introduces a cast of characters that stray beyond stereotypical images of bowing geisha and dark-suited businessmen. The 14 stories include: The Fox by Nagai KafuFlash Storm by Satomi TonOne Woman and the War by Sakaguchi AngoBorneo Diamond by Hayashi FumikoInvitation to Suicide by Watanabe Jun'ichi Lovers of fiction and students of Japan are certain to find these stories absorbing, engaging and instructive.
Saddam City
One morning Mustafa Ali Noman, a teacher in Baghdad, is arrested as he reaches the school gates. For the next fifteen months he witnesses countless scenes of torture as he himself is brutally interrogated, shuffled from prison to prison and barred from contacting his family. The question of his guilt or innocence clearly irrelevant, Mustafa must fight to retain a grip on reality. 'How do I know that I am not dreaming this?' he asks. Mahmoud Saeed's devastating novel evokes the works of Kafka, Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel in its account of wanton treatment by Saddam Hussein's feared secret police. Narrated in a straightforward manner that makes it all the more vivid, Mustafa's story testifies to the brutal arbitrariness of life under tyranny.
Fatma
'There was a blue cast to Satjma's handsomely sculpted mesmerizing tale of earthbound witchery and celestial love." Fatma, an Arabian peasant girl, unwittingly embarks upon a strange journey of transformation the day her father marries her off to a snake handler. Unbeknownst to the new bride, her husband milks the venom of his snakes for use in potions he sells on the side. Bitten by one of the snakes, Fatma changes from na簿ve girl to sensuous woman. What's more, she now gains an arcane affinity for her husband's reptiles as well as a talent for controlling them. This trait will enable her to travel from the sands of Arabia to the shadows of the Netherworld beyond the realm of ordinary human experience. Resonating with ritual and mystery, Fatma is a fabulous tale of one woman's path to ecstasy--an enraptured vision of enchantment in this world and fulfillment in another. The first novel to be published in English by one of the most distinguished of modern Arabic writers, this imaginative work blends naturalistic prose, poetry, and song with all the magic of its author's abundant literary gifts.
Nile Sparrows
Set in the author's own Nile-side neighborhood of Warraq, Aslan's second novel, the first to be translated and published in English, chronicles the daily rhythm of life of rural migrants to Cairo and their complex webs of familial and neighborly relations over half a century. It opens with the mysterious disappearance of the tiny grandmother, Hanem, who is over 100 years old and is last seen by her daughter-in-law Dalal. Dalal does not have the heart to tell Hanem that her grown children Nargis and Abdel Reheem have both been dead for some time. Her grandson Mr. Abdalla, who has children of his own and not a few flecks of gray in his hair, reluctantly sets out for their home village to search for her, embarking on a bittersweet odyssey into his family's past and a confrontation with his own aging. In an elliptical narrative, Aslan limns a series of vignettes that mimic the workings of memory, moving backward and forward in time and held together by a series of recurrent figures and images. There is Abdalla's father, the tragic al-Bahey Uthman; his quirky and earthy uncle Abdel Reheem; and his sweet mother, Nargis, who dies with her simplest desires unfulfilled. Aslan's moving portrait of the quotidian dramas that constitute the lives of ordinary Egyptians is untainted by populist pretensions or belittling romanticism, and full of the humor and heartbreaking pathos that have become trademarks of the author's style.
Farewell to Alexandria
The eleven short stories in this book take us back to an Alexandria past, the cosmopolitan city as it was experienced by the author in the years before, during, and following the Second World War. Against a backdrop of major events in Alexandria's history, from the halcyon days of the late 1930s, through the alarums of the War, to the 1952 Revolution and the dispersion of almost the entire foreign community of the city, Tzalas weaves his stories peopled with characters from his youth. These are ordinary people, people of different nationalities and faiths, but all Alexandrians, living side by side in the Great City. In describing each character with great sensitivity and perception, Tzalas succeeds not only in capturing the essence of the city itself, but in poignantly foretelling the fundamental changes and exodus that were to come. The events surrounding, among others, a German family caught in the city during the Second World War, three French monks, an old Greek musician, and a group of cultivated elderly Alexandrian gentlemen, are told with an affection often tinged with sadness. Through these characters, Tzalas tells the story of everyday lives caught up in the turbulent currents of history and the transformation of a beloved city the end of an era. Each of the eleven stories is accompanied by an evocative illustration by Anna Boghiguian.
Khufu’s Wisdom
Pharaoh Khufu is battling the Fates. At stake is the inheritance of Egypt's throne, the proud but tender heart of Khufu's beautiful daughter Princess Meresankh, and Khufu's legacy as a sage, not savage, ruler.As the tale begins, Khufu is bored in his great palace at Memphis. To entertain him, his architect Mirabu expounds on the mighty masterwork he has so far spent ten years building, with little yet showing above ground--what will become the Great Pyramid of Giza. Mirabu and the clever vizier Hemiunu tempt him with other amusements as well--but to no avail. Then one of the king's sons fetches a magician with the power to predict the future. The sorcerer says that Khufu's own offspring will not inherit Egypt's throne after him, but that it will fall instead to a son born that very morning to the High Priest of Ra. Furious, Khufu and his crown prince, the ruthless Khafra, set out to change the decree of the Fates--which fight back in the form of Djedefra, the boy at the center of the prophecy, and his heart's desire, Princess Meresankh. Yet will the unsuspecting Khufu survive the intrigue around him--not only to finish his long-awaited book of wisdom, but to become truly wise?
Inventing the Classics
Today the term "Japanese literary classics" implies such texts as the Man'yoshu, Kojiki, Tale of Genji, Tale of the Heike, Noh drama, and the works of Saikaku, Chikamatsu, and Basho, which are considered the wellspring and embodiment of Japanese tradition and culture. Most of these texts, however, did not become "classics" until the end of the nineteenth century, in a process closely related to the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state and to the radical reconfiguration of notions of literature and learning under Western influence. As in Europe and elsewhere, the construction of a national literature and language with a putative ancient lineage was critical to the creation of a distinct nation-state. This book addresses the issue of national identity and the ways in which modern European disciplinary notions of "literature" and genres played a major role in the modern canonization process. These "classics" did not have inherent, unchanging value; instead, their value was produced and reproduced by various institutions and individuals in relation to socio-economic power. How then were these texts elevated and used? What kinds of values were given to them? How was this process related to larger social, political, and religious configurations? This book, which looks in depth at each of the major "classics," explores these questions in a broad historical context, from the medieval period, when multiple canons competed with each other, through the early modern and modern periods. Throughout, the essays focus on the roles of schools, commentators, and socio-religious institutions, and on issues of gender. The result is a new view of the transformation of the Japanese canon and its intimate connection with the issue of national and cultural identity.
Notes of a Desolate Man
Winner of the coveted China Times Novel Prize, this postmodern, first-person tale of a contemporary Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences is among the most important recent novels in Taiwan. The narrator, Xiao Shao, recollects a series of friends and lovers, as he watches his childhood friend, Ah Yao, succumb to complications from AIDS. The brute fact of Ah Yao's death focuses Shao's simultaneously erudite and erotic reflections magnetically on the core theme of mortality. By turns humorous and despondent, the narrator struggles to come to terms with Ah Yao's risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death; the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eros; the solace of writing; the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games; and life on the edge of mainstream Taiwanese society. His feverish journey through forests of metaphor and allusion--from Fellini and L矇vi-Strauss to classical Chinese poetry--serves as a litany protecting him from the ravages of time and finitude. Impressive in scope and detail, Notes of a Desolate Man employs the motif of its characters' marginalized sexuality to highlight Taiwan's vivid and fragile existence on the periphery of mainland China. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin's masterful translation brings Chu T'ien-wen's lyrical and inventive pastiche of political, poetic, and sexual desire to the English-speaking world.
An Anthology of Chinese Literature
Hailed as a groundbreaking text in Chinese Studies, An Anthology of Chinese Literature brings together representative works from the first millennium B.C. to the end of the imperial system in 1911.This collection of over 600 pieces, translated with great clarity and sense of the original, presents the tradition in historical and aesthetic context. Moving roughly chronologically through the tradition, An Anthology of Chinese Literature gathers texts in a variety of genres―songs, letters, anecdotes, poetry, political oratory, plays, traditional literary theory, and more―to show how the essential texts build on and echo each other. Coupled with highly readable commentary, this innovative structure uniquely highlights the interplay among Chinese literature, culture, and history.
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
Rebelling against the contraints of family and society, a young Egyptian woman decides to study medicine, becoming the only woman in a class of men. Her encounters with the other students mdash; as well as the male and female corpses in the autopsy room--intensify her dissatisfaction with and search for identity. She realizes men are not gods as her mother had taught her, that science cannot explain everything, and that she cannot be satisfied by living a life purely of the mind.After a brief and unhappy marriage, she throws herself into her work, becoming a successful physician, but at the same time, she becomes aware of injustice and hypocrisy in society. Fulfillment and love come to her at last in a wholly unexpected way.". . . Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal el Saadawi, one of the leading Egyptian feminist writers, reveals the contradictions embedded in women's self-oppressive struggle against patriarchy."--Khadidiatau Gueye, Research in African Literatures (Indiana University Press)Nawal el Saadawi, born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, Egypt, is an Egyptian physician, psychiatrist, author and activist. She is the founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. In 2004 she won the North-South Prize from the Council of Europe. In 2005 she won the inana International Prize in Belgium. In 2010 she won the Sean MacBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau. She has written and published other novels, memoirs, plays, non-fiction and short stories including Woman at Point Zero, The Hidden Face of Eve and The Fall of the Imam.
Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
The sweep of Japanese literature in all its great variety was made available to Western readers for the first time in this anthology. Every genre and style, from the celebrated No plays to the poetry and novels of the seventeenth century, find a place in this book. An introduction by Donald Keene places the selections in their proper historical context, allowing the readers to enjoy the book both as literature and as a guide to the cultural history of Japan. Selections include "Man'yoshu" or "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves" from the ancient period; "Kokinshu" or "Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry," "The Tosa Diary" of Ki No Tsurayuki, "Yugao" from "Tales of Genji" of Murasaki Shikibu, and "The Pillow Book" of Sei Shonagon from the Heian Period; "The Tale of the Heike" from the Kamakura Period; Plan of the No Stage, "Birds of Sorrow" of Seami Motokiyo, and "Three Poets at Minase" from the Muromachi Period; and Sections from Basho, including "The Narrow Road of Oku," "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki" by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and Waka and haiku of the Tokugawa Period.
