It is a meditation on the benefits of appreciating love, loss, relationships, and fleeting moments of kindness.

    Moving chronologically from Homer to Pasternak--and including such master poets en route as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Montale--the fascinating and hugely informed pieces in this book are themselves meant to be read as "a whole," according to Lowell's telling Introduction, "a single volume, a small anthology of European poetry."

    As much as unemployment, economic stagnation, and social deprivation exacerbate the ongoing turmoil in the banlieues, the root of the problem lies elsewhere: in the continuing fallout from Europe's colonial era. Combining a fascinating and compulsively readable mix of history, literature, and politics with his years of personal experience visiting the banlieues and countries across the Arab world, especially Algeria, Hussey attempts to make sense of the present situation. In the course of teasing out the myriad interconnections between past and present in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Beirut, and Western Europe, The French Intifada shows that the defining conflict of the twenty-first century will not be between Islam and the West but between two dramatically different experiences of the world—the colonizers and the colonized.

    Incorporating poems published over the past fifteen years, The Alphabet in the Park is a book of passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. These are poems about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life. Prado also writes about ordinary matters; she insists that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. To Prado these are not contradictory: "It's the soul that's erotic," she writes.As Ellen Watson says in her introduction, "Adelia Prados poetry is a poetry of abundance. These poems overflow with the humble, grand, various stuff of daily life - necklaces, bicycles, fish; saints and prostitutes and presidents; innumerable chickens and musical instruments...And, seemingly at every turn, there is food." But also, an abundance of dark things, cancer, death, greed. These are poems of appetite, all kinds.

    The novel follows the family of Abu Jaafar, the bookbinder, his wife, widowed daughter-in-law, her two children, and his two apprentices as they witness Christopher Columbus and his entourage in a triumphant parade featuring exotic plants and animals and human captives from the New World. Embedded in the narrative is the preparation for the marriage of Saad, one of the apprentices, and Saleema, Abu Jaafar's granddaughter -- a scenario that is elegantly revealed in a number of parallel scenes. As the new rulers of Granada confiscate books and officials burn the collected volumes, Abu Jaafur quietly moves his rich library out of town. Persecuted Muslims fight to form an independent government, but increasing economic and cultural pressures on the Arabs of Spain and Christian rulers culminate in Christian conversions and Muslim uprisings. A tale that is both vigorous and heartbreaking, this novel will appeal to general readers of Spanish and Arabic literature as well as anyone interested in Christian-Muslim relations.

    When he finally came back to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on the Congo?s southwestern coast, he found a country that in some ways had changed beyond recognition: The cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture had become a Pentecostal church, and his secondary school has been renamed in honor of a previously despised colonial ruler. But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture that still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Now a decorated writer and an esteemed professor at UCLA, Mabanckou finds he can only look on as an outsider in the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother, and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to the Republic of the Congo, his work recalls the writing of V. S. Naipaul and André Aciman, offering a startlingly fresh perspective on the pain of exile, the ghosts of memory, and the paths we take back home.

    But the culture and science thereby brought to Spain, including long-buried knowledge from Greece, largely forgotten during Europe’s Dark Ages, was to have an enduring impact on the country as it emerged into the modern era. In this gracefully written history, Richard Fletcher reveals the Moorish culture in all its fascinating disparity and gives us history at its best: here is vivid storytelling by a renowned scholar.

    Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by William Stone. A precursor of the symbolists and the surreallists, Gerard de Nerval has fascinated many major literary figures, including Proust and Breton, Eliot and Apollinaire, Michaux and Leiris. The great sonnet cycle, in its marvellous combination of spell, quest and dream, continues to fascinate writers, readers and that special category of writerly readers, translators. Menard's translator is the gifted young poet William Stone, who explains his work in a strongly worded essay: "like a partly submerged crocodile, with one amber eye half open, the foreign line sits, waiting for the anxious translator to make a move."

    As a Western stranger in Marrakech, Fernea was met with suspicion and hostility. The story of the slow growth of trust and acceptance between the author and her Moroccan neighbors involves the reader in everyday activities, weddings, funerals, and women's rituals. Both the author and her friends are changed by the encounters that she describes. A Street in Marrakech is a crosscultural adventure, ethnographically sound, and written in an accessible style. Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Azoy, Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan, Third Edition (ISBN 9781577667209); Jordan, The Making of a Modern Kingdom: Globalization and Change in Saudi Arabia (ISBN 9781577667025); and Omidian, When Bamboo Bloom (ISBN 9781577667001).

    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 FelmanContents:Introduction by Andre Dubus IIIWhere are you running to? by Ma JianMeteorite mountain by Can XueLooking for the elephant by Jo Kyung RanChildren of the sky by Seno Gumira AjidarmaThe scripture read backward by ParashuramThe unfinished game by Goli TaraghiThe day in Buenos Aires by Jabbar Yussin HussinTwo poems by Saniyya SalehFaint hints of tranquillity by Adania ShibliShards of reality and glass by Hassan KhaderDrowsy haze by Gamal Al-GhitaniThe uses of English by Akinwumi Isolafrom Provisional by Gabriela AdamesteanuTwo poems by Senadin Musabegovićfrom Experiment with India by Giorgio Manganellifrom The fish of Berlin by Eleonora HummelSeven poems by Bronisław Majfrom His majesty, almighty Death by Myriam Anissimovfrom October 27, 2003 by Etel AdnanVietnam. Thursday by Johan HarstadLightweight champ by Juan VilloroThe sheika's condition by Mario BellatinWhen I was a man by Ambar Pastfrom Revulsion by Horacio Castellanos MoyaThe Chareron inheritance by Evelyne Trouillotfrom Kind's silence by Marcela SoláBaked mud by Juan José SaerSwimming at night by Juan Forn

    La Fanfarlo-part bitter fictionalized autobiography, part parody, part ambiguous poetic exploration, and the poet's only completed work of fictional prose- is very much the work of an apprentice beginning to find his way. In terms only of plot, the story is slender enough: trying to help an acquaintance reclaim her husband from an infatuation with La Fanfarlo, the young poet Samuel Cramer himself falls in love with the exotic dancer and slides from the pursuit of his poetry into the commercialized world of advertising and politics.

    An old god rises up each fall to test his subjects. Once an old woman’s pet, a robot sent to mine an asteroid faces an existential crisis. A magician and his son time-travel to Ngoni country and try to change the course of history. A dead child returns to haunt his grieving mother with terrifying consequences. Candace, an ambitious middle manager, is handed a project that will force her to confront the ethical ramifications of her company’s latest project—the monetization of human memory. Osupa, a newborn village in pre-colonial Yorubaland populated by refugees of war, is recovering after a great storm when a young man and woman are struck by lightning, causing three priests to divine the coming intrusion of a titanic object from beyond the sky.A magician teams up with a disgruntled civil servant to find his missing wand. A taboo error in a black market trade brings a man face-to-face with his deceased father—literally. The death of a King sets off a chain of events that ensnare a trickster, an insane killing machine, and a princess, threatening to upend their post-apocalyptic world. Africa is caught in the tug-of-war between two warring Chinas, and for Ibrahim torn between the lashings of his soul and the pain of the world around him, what will emerge? When the Goddess of Vengeance locates the souls of her stolen believers, she comes to a midwestern town with a terrible past, seeking the darkest reparations. In a post-apocalyptic world devastated by nuclear war, survivors gather in Ife-Iyoku, the spiritual capital of the ancient Oyo Empire, where they are altered in fantastic ways by its magic and power.

    This distinct group, known as the Ñ Generation (as coined by Bill Teck), are the bilingual children of Cuban exiles nourished by two cultural currents—the fragmented traditions and transferred nostalgia of their parents' Caribbean homeland and the very real and present America where they grew up and live.

    We heard about Facebook posts and Tweeted calls to action, but what was missing was testimony from on-the-ground participants—which is precisely what Layla Al-Zubaidi and Matthew Cassel have brought together in Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution. These essays and profoundly moving, often harrowing, firsthand accounts span the region from Tunisia to Syria and include contributors ranging from student activists to seasoned journalists—half of whom are women. This unique collection explores just how deeply politics can be held within the personal and highlights the power of writing in a time of revolution.

    It is this civilization and its destruction at the hands of the West that Richard Hall recreates in this book. Hall's history of the exploration and exploitation by Chinese and Arab travellers, and by the Portuguese, Dutch and British alike is one of brutality, betrayal and colonial ambition.