But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.... It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer." --Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead All proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. 826 Chicago is part of the network of seven writing centers across the United States affiliated with 826 National, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

    ترجم الكتاب إلى العديد من اللغات العالمية.واسم الكتاب كاملاً طوق الحمامة في الألفة والأُلاف. ويحتوي الكتاب على مجموعة من أخبار وأشعار وقصص المحبين، ويتناول الكتاب بالبحث والدَّرس عاطفة الحب الإنسانية على قاعدة تعتمد على شيء من التحليل النفسي من خلال الملاحظة والتجربة. فيعالج ابن حزم في أسلوب قصصي هذه العاطفة من منظور إنساني تحليلي. والكتاب يُعد عملاً فريدًا في بابه.Ibn Hazm's Tawq al-Hamama ('The Ring of the Dove')The famous Arabic book on love and lovers, Tawq al-hamâma ('the Ring of the Dove'), is a splendid witness to the high age of Islamic culture in Spain. The book was written in or around 1022 CE in Játiva, south of Valencia, by Abu Muhammad `Ali Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi (Córdoba, 994-1064 CE). It is a youth work by this famous Andalusian poet, philosopher, jurist and scholar of comparative religion.In thirty chapters Ibn Hazm treats thirty moments or personages that are of relevance to love relationships, such as the signs of love, love at first sight, amorous allusions, correpondence between lovers, the messenger between the lovers, being together, fidelity and unfidelity, separation, death. Ibn Hazm alternates from theoritical observations to anecdotes of daily life and he ornates his essays with an abundance of appropriate poetry. The anecdotes are often very peronal and they give the reader a enthralling view on life and love in Islamic Córdoba. All poetry in the Ring of the Dove is Ibn Hazm's own.The Ring of the Dove has been preserved in only one manuscript, which is, since 1665, part of the Oriental collections of Leiden University Library (where it is registered as Or. 927). It was copied in 1338 CE, most probably in Egypt or Syria, from an original that is now lost. The manuscript was first acquired in Istanbul in the middle of the 17th century by the learned and bibliophile Dutch ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Levinus Warner (1619-1665). After his death his entire collection of books and manuscripts came to Leiden.The first edition of the Arabic text was made by the Russian D.K. Pétrof and was published in Leiden in 1914. Before that R.P.A. Dozy (1820-1883) had already published several fragments. All later editions and the numerous translations of the book are directly, or, mostly, indirectly based on the Leiden manuscript. Together they are proof to the fact that Ibn Hazm in his book on love and lovers treats themes that are for all humans in all times.

    Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesIn Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice—inquisitive, lyrical, and wry—turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.