– Shubhangi Swarup (Latitudes of Longing)

    

    The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.

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    She was born during the War of Independence in the 1940s and disappears on a cold winter night in the 1990s.

    Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment--the new postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005" will stand together with "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2000" as essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.

    These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.

    "It is my destiny to do strange things." My father gripped the wheel of his car. "I am the chauffeur for foolishness."We said no more.Foolhardy missions. Life-altering conversations. Gifts—given and received. Loss. Getting lost. Wisdom delivered before dawn and deep into the night. Love and kissing (not necessarily in that order). Laughter. Rides on the edge. Roses. Ghosts.As a traveling poet and visiting teacher, Naomi Shihab Nye has spent a considerable amount of time in cars, both driving and being driven. Her observations, stories, encounters, and escapades—and the kernels of truth she gathers from them—are laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving, and unforgettable. Buckle up.

    Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Virgina, and now teaches at the University of Georgia. In this entirely unheimlich debut, she enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model. Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project. The extraordinary precision of these poems is so stunning, we can't help but feel blinded by their visions: sock-monkeys, dollhouses, and a circus made of meat vibrate between the playful and the brutal so deftly, each line is a perfect shard of some fantastic planet, gloriously and sadly like our own. As in Blake's apocalyptic images, the sky rolls itself up like a scroll--brilliant in its colors and infinite in its scope. Glorious!--D.A. Powell.

    It is just a very small square in the enormous circle that connects us all.I am the story.I am the poems.And you are my muse.

    

    Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Taia's life with complete disclosure - from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Sal', through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex m'lange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture. Recently hailed by his native country's press as "the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference," Taia, through his calmly transgressive work, has "outed" himself as "the only gay man" in a country whose theocratic law still declares homosexuality a crime. The persistence of prejudices on all sides of the Mediterranean and Atlantic makes the translation of Taia's work both a literary and political event.

    There he struggles to retain his childlike innocence and native pride while striving to support himself in the corrupt and decadent international port. He takes up with a longshoreman and soon meets a rogue's gallery of friends, mostly hustlers and down-and-outers. With his characteristic brilliance and streetwise charm, Mrabet develops the novel's ambiguous theme of the necessity of violence to retain one's innocence.

    Here is the voice of one woman who has not forgotten the plight of her people. Born Black is about culture, conflict, and consciousness.

    Continuing the comedic insight from I’m Too Young to be Seventy, these verses of memories and advice from eighty years of love, marriage, and grandchildren are sure to bring laughs.What does it mean to be eighty? In her wise and playful poems, Judith Viorst discusses love, friendship, grand parenthood, and all the particular marvels—and otherwise—of this extraordinary decade. She describes the wonder of seeing the world with new eyes—not because of revelation but because of a successful cataract operation. She promises not to gently fade away, and not to drive after daylight’s faded away either. She explains how she’s gotten to be a “three-desserts” grandmother (“Just don’t tell your mom!”), shares how memory failure can keep you married, and enumerates her hopes for the afterlife (which she doesn’t believe in, but if it does exist, her sister-in-law better not be there with her). As Viorst gleefully attests, eighty is not too old to dream, to flirt, to drink, and to dance. It’s also not too late to give up being cheap or to take up with a younger man of seventy-eight. Zesty, hopeful, and full of the pleasures of living, Viorst’s poems speak to her legions of readers, who recognize themselves in her knowing observations, in her touching reflections, and in her joyful affirmations. Funny, moving, inspirational, and true—the newest in Judith Viorst’s beloved “decades” series extols the virtues, victories, frustrations, and joys of life.