Book picks similar to
Mister N by Najwa Barakat


lebanon
middle-east-fiction
small-press

Indictus


Natalie Eilbert - 2018
    Women's Studies. INDICTUS re-imagines various creation myths to bear the invisible and unsaid assaults of women. In doing so, it subverts notions of patriarchal power into a genre that can be demolished and set again. INDICTUS is a Latin word, from which other words like "indict" and "indicate" are born. It translates literally as "to write the unsaid." There is an effort in this book to create the supernatural through the utterance of violence, because jurisdiction fails in real time. That sexual assault can so easily become a science fiction when power is rearranged to serve the victim speaks to the abject lack of control within victims to ever be redeemed. Crimes resolve to misdemeanors. In a world without my abusers, how can I soon become myself? Combining the mythological and autobiographical, this book attempts to indict us, so that the wounded might one day be free.

Vampire Conditions


Brian Allen Carr - 2012
    Three cycles. Fists and possums and gunfighters and penises and hookers and short buses and dead babies and fireworks. The stories in this collection originally appeared in: HOBART, FICTION INTERNATIONAL, KITTY SNACKS, TEXAS OBSERVER, NEW BORDER and THE PURITAN.

First Overland: London - Singapore by Land Rover


Tim Slessor - 1957
    It would be one of the longest of all overland journeys - half-way round the world, from the English Channel to Singapore. They knew that several expeditions had already tried it.Some had got as far as the deserts of Persia; a few had even reached the plains of India. But no-one had managed to go on from there: over the jungle-clad mountains of Assam and across northern Burma to Thailand and Malaya. Over the last 3,000 miles it seemed like there were 'just too many rivers and too few roads'. But no-one really knew...

Jimmy the Freak


Charles Colyott - 2019
    This has made him the perfect target for abuse by those who would exploit his wild talent for their own power and glory.Disgusted by his part in the game, Jimmy’s bodyguard Mike takes him on the run. But Mike’s boss isn’t the sort to let a meal ticket go easily, so he dispatches a brutal hitman named Ash to hunt them down and bring Jimmy back to work.Winding through a snow-covered landscape of back alleys, cheap motels, and strip clubs, Mike must fight his own personal demons while desperately trying to keep Jimmy free.

Modern Arabic Short Stories: A Bilingual Reader


Ronak Husni - 2008
    In addition to works by writers already well-known in the West such as Idwār al-Kharrāṭ, Fu’ād al-Takarlī and Nobel Prize-winning Najīb Maḥfūẓ , the collection includes stories by key authors whose fame has hitherto been restricted to the Middle East.This bilingual reader is ideal for students of Arabic as well as lovers of literature who wish to broaden their appreciation of the work of Middle Eastern writers. The collection features stories in the original Arabic, accompanied by an English translation and a brief author biography, as well as a discussion of context and background. Each story is followed by a glossary and discussion of problematic language points.Ronak Husni is a senior lecturer at Heriot-Watt University where she teaches Arabic language, literature and translation.Daniel L. Newman is Course Director of the MA in Arabic/English Translation at the University of Durham. He also published An Imam in Paris (Saqi Books).

The Wrath of Fate: Book 1 of The Airship Pirate Chronicles


'Captain' Robert Brown - 2011
    Cities are walled, and citizens are chained to round the clock jobs in order to keep them controlled and in the place. Change and progress is outlawed.There will come a time...when clockworks wake up, only to find they are not allowed to be awake. They hide in fear, not daring to break there chains of slavery.There will come a time...when freedom is outlawed. When men must scrape a living in the dirt of the parries, or in the skies above them. These hardened men and women fight for there lives and their freedom against beasts of the field, police in the cities, and pirates in the sky. When freedom is outlawed, only the outlaws are free.This time will come, and it was all my fault. Sorry about that.

Our Love Will Go The Way of the Salmon


Cameron Pierce - 2014
    From kidnapping to bank robbing, pursuing rainbow trout to unspeakable monsters, from the deserts of Texas to the desolate forests of Oregon, Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon is about the extreme measures people take to recapture the ones that got away.

Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How To Solve Unexplained Mysteries


Benjamin Radford - 2010
    Author Benjamin Radford has investigated unexplained phenomena for over a decade, not just read or written about them, but actually gone out to see what's there. Unlike most other books and reality TV shows on the supernatural or paranormal, Radford strictly adheres to scientific methods. In a nutshell, Scientific Paranormal Investigation is the equivalent of The X-Files meets CSI: Crime Scene Investigations: applying scientific methods and principles to real-life mysteries, and coming up with explanations when it seems none are possible. Whether the subject is a crime scene or a haunted house, the questions are the same: What did eyewitnesses see? What does the evidence show? If the paranormal ghosts, psychics, or Bigfoot really exist, there should be valid scientific evidence for them. Scientific Paranormal Investigation draws from dozens of cases and mysteries, explaining step-by-step the science-based methods Radford used to solve them.

Some Things That Meant the World to Me


Joshua Mohr - 2009
    "Charles Bukowski will dig the grit in this seedy novel, a poetic rendering of postmodern San Francisco." -O, The Oprah MagazineA Best Book of the Year -The Nervous Breakdown"Where Michel Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road." -The Collagist"Mohr's prose roams with chimerical liquidity. The magic of this book is a disturbing, hallucinogenic magic." -Boston's Weekly DigFollowing a 30-year-old man named Rhonda suffering from depersonalization, Some Things That Meant the World to Me is a gritty and beautiful work that is creative and hypnotic, and should stand as an introduction of an original new voice to American literature.When Rhonda was a child — abandoned and ignored by his mother; abused and misguided by his mother's boyfriend — he imagined the rooms of his home drifting apart from one another like separating continents. Years later, after an embarassing episode as an adult, Rhonda's inner-child appears, leading him to a trapdoor in the bottom of a dumpster behind a taqueria that will force him to finally confront his troubled past.In the spirit of Cruddy and Hairstyles of the Damned, Joshua Mohr has created a remarkable and unforgettable character in this charmingly poetic and maturely crafted first novel.Joshua Mohr has been published in Other Voices, The Cimarron Review, Pleiades, and Gulf Coast, among others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at a halfway house.

He Digs A Hole


Danger Slater - 2018
    Get married. Buy a house. Cut off your hands and replace them with gardening tools. Dig a hole. Can you hear the worms calling? Keep digging.

Lebanon: A House Divided


Sandra Mackey - 1989
    Covering Lebanon's history through the Civil War of 1975—89, Sandra Mackey lays the groundwork needed to comprehend this often ill-understood country—offering insight into its role as the gateway between West and East, and bringing a clarity of focus to the schisms that serve to divide and define Lebanon.

A History of Modern Lebanon


Fawwaz Traboulsi - 2007
    It is entirely unique as the last history of Lebanon was published more than forty years ago. Written by a leading Lebanese scholar and based on previously inaccessible archives, it is a fascinating and beautifully-written account of one of the world's most fabled countries.Starting with the formation of Ottoman Lebanon in the sixteenth century, Fawwaz Traboulsi covers the growth of Beirut as a capital for trade and culture through the nineteenth century. The main part of the book concentrates on Lebanon's development in the twentieth century and the conflicts that led up to the major wars in the 1970s and 1980s. Lebanon in the twentieth century has seen turbulent times, the results of which we still see today.This is a rich history of Lebanon that brings to life its politics, its people, and the crucial role that it has always played in world affairs.

Niko


Dimitri Nasrallah - 2011
    He rarely leaves his parents' small apartment, and from its small balcony he listens to the world outside tumble down one building at a time. But after a car bomb kills his pregnant mother, Niko is thrust into a much wider and confusing world without apartments or balconies, as he and his father Antoine embark upon the open seas on an impossible international adventure in search of a new place to call home. Throughout a twelve-year odyssey that leads them across seven countries, young Niko will have to choose between his swollen faith in an increasingly God-like and unreliable Antoine, and the pragmatic, hard-nosed alternatives that will ultimately lead to a better future.Swiftly paced, poignantly moving, and beautifully imagined, Niko is the powerful epic story of what it takes to survive after war, of what to hold dear and what to leave behind in a world that won't let you have it

Ultraviolet


Suzanne Matson - 2018
    Returning to the American Midwest as a teenager, Kathryn feels alienated and restless. When she loses her mother prematurely to a stroke, she escapes to Oregon for a fresh start. Wanting to continue her education and become a writer, she supports herself as a waitress in wartime America, dating soldiers, then meeting and marrying Finnish-American Carl. A construction worker sixteen years her senior, he is an unlikely match, though appealing in his carefree ways and stark difference from her Mennonite past. But Kathryn ends up feeling trapped in the marriage, her ambitions thwarted. Samantha, who’s grown up in the atmosphere of her mother’s discontent, follows her own career to teach at a university in faraway Boston and maintains a happy family of her own.When Kathryn starts to fail, Samantha moves her mother near her to care for, and then to watch over her deathbed, where “something in the room—the spell, the cord knitting them together—is cut. Or no, that can’t be right, either.” Ultraviolet is a lyrical novel of great emotional depth. Suzanne Matson recognizes both the drama that is within every existence and the strengths and fragilities of our relationships with others. She shines a brilliant light on the complexities of marriage, motherhood, aging, and the end of life.

Sabra Zoo


Mischa Hiller - 2010
    A pacy debut thriller: harrowing, provocative and moving, this is a deeply felt account of the Sabra massacre in Beirut, 1982.