Book picks similar to
I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops by Hanan Al-Shaykh
short-stories
fiction
middle-east
arabic
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury - 1980
--No particular night or morning --The city --The fire balloons --The last night of the world --The veldt --The long rain --The great fire --The wilderness --A sound of thunder --The murderer --The April witch --Invisible boy --The golden kite, the silver wind --The fog horn --The black black and white game --Embroidery --The golden apples of the sun --Powerhouse --Hail and farewell --The great wide world over there --The playground --Skeleton --The man upstairs --Touched with fire --The emissary --The jar --The small assasin --The next in line --Jack-in-the-box --The leave-taking --Exorcism --The happiness machine --Calling Mexico --The wonderful ice cream suit --Dark they were, and golden-eyed --The strawberry window --A scent of sarsaparilla --The Picasso summer --The day it rained forever --A medicine for melancholy --The shoreline at sunset --Fever dream --The town where no one got off --All summer in a day --Frost and fire --The anthem sprinters --And so died Riabouchinska --Boys! Raise giant mushrooms in your cellar! --The vacation --The illustrated woman --Some live like Lazarus --The best of all possible worlds --The one who waits --Tyrannosaurus Rex --The screaming woman --The terrible conflagration up at the place --Night call, collect --The tombling day --The haunting of the new --Tomorrow's child --I sing the body electric! --The women --The inspired chicken motel --Yes, we'll gather at the river --Have I got a chocolate bar for you! --A story of love --The parrot who met Papa --The October game --Punishment without crime --A piece of wood --The blue bottle --Long after midnight --The utterly perfect murder --The better part of wisdom --Interval in sunlight --The black ferris --Farewell summer --McGillahee's brat --The aqueduct --Gotcha! --The end of the beginning.
Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman's Journey Toward Independence
Leila Abouzeid - 1989
Both obstacles and support systems change as she actively participates in the struggle for Moroccan independence from France.
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Marguerite Young - 1965
It is a picaresque, psychological novel--a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young's method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters--and the nature of reality. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveler, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wild man of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard--these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. The novel touches on many aspects of life--drug addiction, woman's suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy both real and imaginary, schizophrenia, many strange loves, the psychology of gambling, perfectionism; but the profusion of this huge book serves always to intensify the force of the central question: "What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?" What is real, what is dream? Is the calendar of the human heart the same as that kept by the earth? Is it possible that one may live a secondary life of which one does not know? In every aspect, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands by itself--in the lyric beauty of its prose, its imaginative vitality and cumulative emotional power. It is the work of a writer of genius.
The Houseguest and Other Stories
Amparo Dávila - 2018
With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.
The Gurkha's Daughter: Stories
Prajwal Parajuly - 2012
These are just some of the stories describing and dramatizing the experiences of the Nepalese people and the Nepalese diaspora - the people whose culture and language is Nepalese but who are dispersed to India, Bhutan and beyond. From every perspective and on every page, Prajwal Parajuly blends rich colour and vernacular to paint an eye-opening picture of a unique world and its people.
The Shutter of Snow
Emily Holmes Coleman - 1930
Believing herself to be God, she maneuvers through an institutional world that is both sad and terrifying, echoing the worlds of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "The Snake Pit."Based upon the author's own experience after the birth of her son in 1924, "The Shutter of Snow" retains all the energy it had when first published in 1930.
The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector - 2015
Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Lispector’s stories take us through their lives—and ours.From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.
The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
Yōko Ogawa - 1990
A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool—a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination—but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's? A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.
Sitt Marie Rose
Etel Adnan - 1977
It reveals the tribal mentality which makes the Middle East a dangerous powerhouse. It constitutes a new narrative form and is already a classic of war literature. It won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into ten languages.
Come Together, Fall Apart
Cristina Henríquez - 2006
They illustrate family bonds and generational conflicts, youthful infatuation and genuine passion. Tender, ambitious, bold, and unflinching, they herald the arrival of a fresh, exciting, and lavishly talented new voice in American literature.
Amsterdam Stories
Nescio - 2012
No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity about the radiating canals of Amsterdam and the cloud-swept landscape of the Netherlands. Who was Nescio? Nescio—Latin for “I don’t know”—was the pen name of J.H.F. Groenloh, the highly successful director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and a father of four—someone who knew more than enough about respectable maturity. Only in his spare time and under the cover of a pseudonym, as if commemorating a lost self, did he let himself go, producing over the course of his lifetime a handful of utterly original stories that contain some of the most luminous pages in modern literature. This is the first English translation of Nescio’s stories.Contents:The freeloaderWhen we were titansThe writing on the wallOut along the IJLittle poetFrom an unfinished novelThe valley of obligationsThe endInsula dei
I Have the Right to Destroy Myself
Young-Ha Kim - 1995
I have no interest in one person killing another. I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious. This lust, once freed, starts growing. Their imaginations run free, and they soon discover their potential... They are waiting for someone like me.A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the lost and wounded of big-city Seoul, suggesting solace in suicide. Wandering through the bright lights of their high-urban existence, C and K are brothers who fall in love with the same woman - Se-yeon. As their lives intersect, they tear at each other in a struggle to find connection in their fast-paced, atomized world.Dreamlike and cinematic, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself brilliantly affirms Young-ha Kim as Korea's leading young literary master.
Lizard
Banana Yoshimoto - 1993
explores themes of time, healing and fate, and how her urban, sophisticated, independent young men and women come to terms with them. The stories are a blend of traditional Japanese and contemporary popular culture.
Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet
Xinran - 2004
Xinran made the trip and met the woman, called Shu Wen, who recounted the story of her thirty-year odyssey in the vast landscape of Tibet.Shu Wen and her husband had been married for only a few months in the 1950s when he joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two countries. Shortly after he left she was notified that he had been killed, although no details were given. Determined to find the truth, Shu Wen joined a militia unit going to the Tibetan north, where she soon was separated from the regiment. Without supplies and knowledge of the language, she wandered, trying to find her way until, on the brink of death, she was rescued by a family of nomads under whose protection she moved from place to place with the seasons and eventually came to discover the details of her husband's death.In the haunting Sky Burial, Xinran has recreated Shu Wen's journey, writing beautifully and simply of the silence and the emptiness in which Shu Wen was enveloped. The book is an extraordinary portrait of a woman and a land, each at the mercy of fate and politics. It is an unforgettable, ultimately uplifting tale of love, loss, loyalty, and survival.
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Franz Kafka - 1915
Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Franz Kafka is now one of the world’s most widely read and discussed authors. His nightmarish novels and short stories have come to symbolize modern man’s anxiety and alienation in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized world. This vision is most fully realized in Kafka’s masterpiece, “The Metamorphosis,” a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature. Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. “The Judgment,” which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and “The Stoker,” which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with “The Metamorphosis,” form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,” and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.Also included are “In the Penal Colony,” a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and “A Hunger Artist,” about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.Jason Baker is a writer of short stories living in Brooklyn, New York.