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Rafik Schami's award-winning novel. In the classical Arab tradition of tale-telling, here is a magical book that celebrates the power of storytelling, delightfully transformed for modern sensibilities by an award-winning author. The time is present-day Damascus, and Salim the coachman, the city's most famous storyteller, is mysteriously struck dumb. To break the spell, seven friends gather for seven nights to present Salim with seven wondrous "gifts"—seven stories of their own design. Upon this enchanting frame of tales told in the fragrant Arabian night, the words of the past grow fainter, as ancient customs are yielding to modern turmoil. While the hairdresser, the teacher, the wife of the locksmith sip their tea and pass the water pipe, they swap stories about the magical and the mundane: about djinnis and princesses, about contemporary politics and the difficulties of bargaining in a New York department store. And as one tale leads to another... and another... all of Damascus appears before your eyes, along with a vision of storytelling—and talk—as the essence of friendship, of community, of life. A sly and graceful work, a delight to readers young and old, Damascus Nights is, according to Publishers Weekly, "a highly atmospheric, pungent narrative."
A crime of passion brings on a harrowing criminal investigation in a divided land Set in the exotic and turbulent world of Syria in the 1930s, Night Falls on Damascus tells the story of a French-Syrian police inspector, Nikolai Faroun, caught up in a complex murder investigation of a beautiful and controversial woman from a prominent Damascus family. Vera Tamiri made enemies for her good works as well as her cosmopolitanism. On one hand was she was a social reformer who had tried to advance the health and welfare of Arab women in a volatile community hemmed in by custom and hostile to social change. However, Vera had a shadowy side: she cultivated a Bohemian pose, gambled recklessly, and was not always wise in her choice of companions---and lovers. Faroun suspects that she may have fallen victim to a gruesome crime of passion. However, he soon realizes that there is more to this crime than a jealous lover. In a country chafing under foreign rule and divided by sectarian strife, Vera Tamiri made a tempting political target. In a city seething with anger and revolt, Inspector Faroun begins unraveling a conspiracy from Syria's troubled past, a secret that Vera may have uncovered---at the cost of her life. As the elements of a sinister and elusive crime bubble to the surface, Faroun must be careful not to bring to light secrets of his own---the real reason for his presence in Damascus and a compromising relationship with the beautiful and willful wife of a well-connected French businessman. All games, in the end, must be played against the dark backdrop of a city that has been the center of Middle Eastern intrigue for millennia, the stony ground where Cain slew Abel, where Saladin once ruled, and where Nikolai Faroun must discover the key to the murder of a courageous woman who dared to disturb the ancient order. A gripping murder mystery, Night Falls on Damascus richly evokes a time and place where the deadly conflict between modernism and tradition in the Middle East first came into play. Praise for Ghost Eaters "A swashbuckling, seafaring novel with mystical overtones." ---Publishers Weekly "An exciting, smoothly written naval adventure set in Malaysia during 1875. Touching on the politics of war, the power of superstition, and the fragility of civilization, this is exhilarating escapist fare." ---Booklist "The book is peopled with rich, enigmatic characters whose pasts are shrouded in mystery and whose motives are close held secrets." ---Jim Nelson, author of the Revolution at Sea series "Glorious shades of Joseph Conrad, but with wry humor! Splendidly written and an intriguing adventure /mystery in the grand old style." ---Dewey Lambdin, author of the Alan Lewrie series "Unashamedly and convincingly Conradian in its subject matter and scope, and in the raw and elemental language of its telling . . . this is the work of a devoted and accomplished storyteller, and of a gifted writer and craftsman, for whom the completed tale is considerably more than the sum of its parts." ---Robert Edric, author of The Broken Lands
"[F]illed with rare encounters with Syria's oldest, most elite families. Critics of anthropology's taste for exoticism and marginality will savor this study of upper-class Damascus, a world that is urbane and cosmopolitan, yet in many ways as remote as the settings in which the best ethnography has traditionally been done.... [Written] with a nuanced appreciation of the cultural forms in question and how Damascenes themselves think, talk about, and create them." -- Andrew Shryock In contemporary urban Syria, debates about the representation, preservation, and restoration of the Old City of Damascus have become part of status competition and identity construction among the city's elite. In theme restaurants and nightclubs that play on images of Syrian tradition, in television programs, nostalgic literature, and visual art, and in the rhetoric of historic preservation groups, the idea of the Old City has become a commodity for the consumption of tourists and, most important, of new and old segments of the Syrian upper class. In this lively ethnographic study, Christa Salamandra argues that in deploying and debating such representations, Syrians dispute the past and criticize the present. Indiana Series in Middle East Studies -- Mark Tessler, general editor
A late work by the Egyptian Nobel literature laureate, Morning and Evening Talk is an epic tale of Egyptian life over five generations. Set in Cairo, it traces the fortunes of three families from the arrival of Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century to the 1980s, using short character sketches arranged in alphabetical order. This highly experimental device produces a kind of biographical dictionary, whose individual entries come together to paint a vivid portrait of life in Cairo from a range of different perspectives. The characters include representatives of every class and human type, and as the intricate family saga unfolds, a powerful picture of a society in transition--and the accompanying upheaval--emerges. This is a tale of change and continuity, of the death of a traditional way of life, of the road to independence and beyond, seen through the eyes of Egypt's citizens. Naguib Mahfouz's last chronicle of Cairo is an elegy to a bygone era and a tribute to the Egyptian spirit. It is also one of his most technically innovative contributions to the Arabic novel.
Author : Nancy Lindisfarne Publisher : State University of New York Press Page : 188 pages File Size : 49,6 Mb Release : 2000-08-03 Category : Social Science ISBN : 9780791492307
Growing out of the author's anthropological fieldwork in Syria, these nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus. Available here together for the first time in English, they confound popular stereotypes of Arab women and men as fundamentalists, terrorists, and victims of the Gulf War. The stories touch on such themes as tyranny, good and bad fortune in marriage, exile, the snobbery of old wealth, the ambition of new money, and much else. In a postscript, "The Pirates' Socks," Lindisfarne discusses why she chose to write about her fieldwork through the medium of fiction, and how writing these stories allowed her to tell truths an academic monograph could not contain. An Arabic edition of Dancing in Damascus was published in Syria in 1997, to considerable acclaim throughout the Arab world.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments; The "Aldine" Edition In Four Volumes by Jonathan Scott Pdf
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.