"Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life in the global Arab/Muslim world. Stories from the Center of the World gathers new writing from the Greater Middle East, a vast region that stretches from Southwest Asia, through the Middle East and Turkey, and across Northern Africa. The 25 authors included here are either native to the region, or part of a diasporic community, a diverse mix of men and women, queer and straight, who come from a wide range of cultures and countries, including Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, to name a few. Selected from among a wave of new fiction published in The Markaz Review, this 'best of' collection features both well-established and emerging writers, some being published in English for the first time. The stories span a number of styles and genres, from literary fiction to sci-fi, epistolary to noir. In 'Asha and Haaji,' Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders who become uprooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. In Nektar Anastasiadou's 'The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,' two students in Istanbul from different classes--and religions that have often been at odds with one another--believe they can overcome all obstacles. MK Harb's story, 'Counter Strike,' is about queer love among Beiruti adolescents; and Salar Abdoh's 'The Roots of Heaven' invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. In 'Eleazar,' Karim Kattan tells an unexpected Palestinian story in which the usual antagonists--Israeli occupation forces--are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. Omar El Akkad's 'The Icarist' is a coming-of-age story about the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away. The Markaz Review, an online journal of literature and the arts, was founded in 2020 with a mission to showcase work from a cultural region that's often overlooked or misrepresented. Here, we get a different viewpoint. Moving from the margins to the center, or the markaz--a word and a concept shared among languages and cultures of the region--the writers featured here establish a worldview that highlights the vanguard creativity and humanity of the various populations represented in their stories"
Presents key voices and essential texts relevant to understanding today’s abolitionist movement. Supporters of the contemporary abolitionist movement, which has exploded since the George Floyd protests of 2020, will be eager to read this book. Includes an unpublished communique by Angela Davis written in her 20s while she was in jail. Co-editor Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most famous political prisoner alive today.The editorial arc of the book is historical, beginning with the anti-slavery era and continuing through to the present day. Book is accessible, inspirational, and rhetorically powerful. Co-editor Jennifer Black will schedule a speaking tour for PA, NY, NJ, DC, MD, MA, and beyond. Institutional partnership with the Prison Radio Project, a resource-strong not-for-profit organization dedicated to giving voice to incarcerated people.
Incendiary, lyrical poems of liberation from the oppression of Black womanhood. "To encounter the words of mimi tempestt on the page, or in performance, is to witness the rare transcendency of language where the line becomes an exacting blade. i dare you not to sleep on any prodigious Black woman’s soliloquy. i dare you to hold these words & find yourself implicated in the violent acts that serve as the backdrop to the blood spilled onto these pages. Read this book. You have no choice. Approach with caution. Defend yourself with claims of nuance and complexities. Do what you must, but know that once unsheathed these words, as Hanzo steel, have a way of cutting through the whiteness to get to the realities of Black and Brown truths."—Truong Tran, author of Book of the Other: Small in ComparisonWedding fierce, even jagged lines to an uncompromisingly lyrical flow honed over years of performance, mimi tempestt writes poems that are by turns cerebral, profane, revolutionary, comedic, erotic, and sentimental, with a visual sense that explodes across the page. the delicacy of embracing spirals is her second book, an investigation of the ways in which the personal narrative of Black womanhood can be expressed through a radically human lens, to expand on the possibilities of selfhood, liberation, and autonomy. Beginning with microcosmic poems of personal struggle and spiraling out into macrocosmic texts of social and political critique, the book culminates in an account of the impossible staging of a play where the lives of the characters and the audience are at stake. The three central questions this collection raises are “What haunts you? What hunts you? Who and what are you hunting?” the delicacy of embracing spirals blends theatre, melodrama, art, and lyricism through fragmented language, mosaic pieces, narrative, histories, and characterizations. It prioritizes the use of an ongoing dialectic to express a consciousness about being Black, being woman, being queer, being radical, being complex, being imperfect, being beautiful, being alive, being oppressed, and most essentially, being complicatedly human. The poems utilize memory and narrative to radically engage with the “performance” of oppression that gets in the way of Black womanhood and prevents Black humanity from being fulfilled. Most importantly, this collection unapologetically holds the white gaze hostage.
This is Clark Coolidge's most famous book, the one everyone references, long out of print after a 2nd successful publication with Sun & Moon Press in 1995. (The book was originally published by The Figures Press in 1986)This new edition features new material: a preface by poet and scholar Peter Gizzi, and an interview in the afterword where Coolidge addresses the genesis of the poem.Clark Coolidge is associated with the New York School and writers Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, and Larry Fagin.He is also linked with the Language Poets including Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Michael Palmer.In Gizzi's preface, he mentions the many authors who consider Coolidge to be their favorite poet. This includes: James Schuyler, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Bill Corbett, Geoffrey Young, Barbara Guest, Peter Straub, Michael Palmer, Rosmarie Waldrop, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Blaser, David Shapiro, John Yau, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Raworth, Paul Auster, Bernadette Mayer, & Fanny HoweThe Crystal Text is comparable to Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," a meditation on an object.Bay-area events are planned.
From Will Alexander, finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a new collection of poems from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism, where Césaire meets Sun Ra. Divine Blue Light further affirms Alexander’s status as one of the most unique and innovative voices in contemporary poetry.One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Notable Poetry Books for Fall 2022!“Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines.”—The New York TimesAgainst the ruins of a contemporary globalist discourse, which he denounces as a “lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality,” Will Alexander’s poems constitute an alternative cartography that draws upon omnivorous reading—in subjects from biology to astronomy to history to philosophy—amalgamating their diverse vocabularies into an impossible instrument only he can play. Divine Blue Light is anchored by three major works: the opening “Condoned to Disappearance,” a meditation on the heteronymic exploits of Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa; the closing “Imprecation as Mirage,” a poem channeling an Indonesian man; and the title poem, an anthemic ode to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Other key pieces include “Accessing Gertrude Bell,” a critique of one of the designers of the modern state of Iraq; “Deficits: Chaïm Soutine & Joan Miró,” in homage to two Jewish artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France; and “According to Stellar Scale,” a compact lyric that traveled to space with astronaut Sian Proctor. The newest installment in our Pocket Poets Series, Divine Blue Light confirms Alexander’s status among the foremost surrealists writing in English today.Praise for Divine Blue Light:"Adopting a surrealist approach to making sense of the universe, Alexander plumbs language for its limits, often with dazzling results....Pondering the mysteries of existence and artistic influence, this engrossing work turns the quest for self-knowledge into a choral act."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"Alexander’s range—which moves past the propriety of each subject to the expansiveness of every—can be approximated as Aimé Césaire’s totality of the lion, or form and emptiness, or appositional, apparitional Black being. And this being is most real and realized through the collection’s quantum mechanics and dynamics, which Alexander invokes astrophysically, evokes metaphysically."—Jenna Peng, The Poetry Foundation"These surrealist and Afrofuturist poems examine politics, globalism, and the powers and limitations of language, while paying tribute to artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France.”—Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly"The 'invisible current' Will Alexander channels in the meteoric poems of Divine Blue Light is not surreal escape but vibrational engagement—an engagement with the infinite streams of the heart of being."—Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light"Like agua tilting itself into a god, Will’s texts suffuse the horizon of Poetry with the abstract purity of their oceanic movements, sun-condensing, dissolving seemingly endless sight into a disappearing instant of the Miraculous. Divine Blue Light exists by what it exudes."—Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter
This novel offers a lyrical discussion of the rights, roles, and obligations of citizens in society as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in our lives. It’s a philosophical reflection on how Google & Co. meddle with our individual lives and our relationships with each other, and the increasingly ubiquitous control they exert on the general circulation of information, ideas, and capital. It joins the ranks of other works of fiction that dive into these topics, such as Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail, Dave Eggers's The Every, Sherry Turkle's The Empathy Diaries, and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. The author combines an unflinching look at the contemporary realities of class in the capitalist, consumer societies with a deep affection and caring for the humans who live in them. This novel concentrates specifically on the pervaviseness of Google—in many respects the air that many of us in the United States and Europe breathe—in terms of ethics, morals, philosophy, and human values. Gopegui dives into these topics with beautiful and thought-provoking prose. The story will resonate with people concerned about how the internet, and social media, impact our daily lives For readers of Machines Like Me, by Ian Mc Ewan and Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which are both similar in the way they care about our future and different because this novel does not focus on the nature of machines but rather, how we humans are machines—complex and fascinating but machines in the end, and how it is for precisely that reason that why we should be more careful, tender, and brave.
Joyce Chopra is currently being recognized as a pioneer in the history of film, one of the rare women directors, a precursor, role model and inspiration to young women directing films today. With the success of Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Lost Daughter," Chloe Zhao's "Nomadland," Ava Duvernay’s "13th," and Jane Campion's "Power of the Dog," female filmmakers are garnering more attention than ever. Chopra discusses the kind of gender discrimination that she faced in the industry, long before #MeToo and the resulting public awareness of the gender disparities and abuse in Hollywood. Joyce Chopra’s work is celebrated in two new/forthcoming books about women in film, including: Alicia Malone's "Girls on Film (Mango Press, March 2022);" and Amanda Reyes's forthcoming "Dangerous Passion" (Headpress 2023). Chopra's Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film Smooth Talk is being rediscovered following its recent inclusion in the "Revivals Line-Up" at the New York Film Festival. The New Yorker, among other high profile media, wrote about the re-release. Hollywood support & advocacy: Smooth Talk launched actress Laura Dern's career, and she will actively promote this book. Chopra has won numerous awards for her filmmaking, while her groundbreaking documentary, Joyce at 34, is held in the NY MoMA's permanent collection. Upon publication the Criterion Collection channel will feature Lady Director along with a special series on Chopra's films. Lady Director offers rare, tell-all experiences that will be appreciated by audiences who like memoir, movie and TV insider accounts, coming-of-age stories, and a woman’s struggle to achieve her dreams.
•President Biden is committed to featuring Harriet Tubman's visage on the $20 bill, and Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle are putting pressure on him to follow through.•Lusane is a seasoned public speaker sought out by A-list media outlets such as NPR, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC.•Lusane will write op-eds for major national papers & websites. His latest on the life of Colin Powell was just published in the Washington Post.•2022 is the 200th birthyear of Harriet Tubman, and we'll insert the author into the media coverage.•This book is unique in discussing the overlap of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson's lives, and the ways in which each of them defined the character of 19th century America.•Special illustrated section includes prototypes of the "Tubman Twenty," and historical images from the Library of Congress.•This book will appeal to the millions of supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, and more generally to trade and academic readers who follow emerging trends in social and racial justice education and organizing.•Will pursue events at independent bookstore and libraries, The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), The Harriet Tubman Museum & Education Center (MD), and elsewhere. Requests are welcomed!
Vivid stories from one of Turkey's most admired contemporary female authors, whose political ties have landed her in Turkish prison.
Full of wit and wonder, these prose poems, meditations, and narratives open onto rare and unexpected vistas of history and myth, language, and the art of writing.". . .one of the most distinguished and enigmatic of modern Greek poets, full of Platonic wisdom. His originality of temperament is a most singluar thing. . . .[his] new book is splendid." -Lawrence Durrell"The purpose of the book is twofold: first, to revise certain aspects of nationalist modernism, and secondly, to radicalize Greek modernism by undermining continuity and tradition. . . . Valaoritis's revision primarily concerns the continuity and validity of tradition as expressed in the "myth of Greekness."" -Panayiotis Bosnakis, Journal of Modern Greek StudiesNanos Valaoritis was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1921, of Greek parents. He has lived in Athens, Paris, and the United States. One of Greece's most distinguished contemporary writers, he is the author of novels, plays, and poetry, and was twice awarded the Greek national poetry prize.
Turkey's great experimental modernist pens a philosophical novel in three parts about desire, faith, and the psychology of prohibited love.
MacArthur Genius Guillermo Gómez-Peña and award-winning book artist Felicia Rice create a multi-media border-crossing hybrid: the book as performance art.
Beat Atlas is the ultimate tour guide for those interested in the Beats and their travels "on the road."
"Family Album is Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemâan's rollicking follow up to her acclaimed English-language debut, Poso Wells. Alemâan is known for her spirited and sardonic take on the fatefully interconnected--and often highly compromised--forces at work in present-day South America, and particularly in Ecuador. In this collection of eight hugely entertaining short stories, she dives deep into the tales that Ecuadorian's like to tell about themselves, following the foundational creation myths of that small South American nation all the way to their logical and sometimes ignominious ends. A muddy brew of pop-culture and pop-folklore yields intriguing, lesser-known episodes of contemporary Ecuadorian history, along with a rich cast of unforgettable minor characters whose intimate stories open up onto a vista of Ecuador's place on the world stage, now and all along the way. Alemâan teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of historical forces and national identity. The stories provide a humorous spin on universal themes of human frailty and desire, while taking on some difficult and complex issues, including misogynistic violence, the exploitation and appropriation of natural resources, violence against indigenous groups, religious tensions, political corruption, and the steady flow of illicit drugs. From a pair of deep-sea divers using Robinson Crusoe's map of a shipwreck to locate sunken treasure in the seas of the Galapagos Archipelago, to an outlaw pilot who flies a group of missionaries from the American Midwest deep into the Amazon jungle, where their attempt to convert an indigenous village results in a massacre, opening the way for the appropriation of natives' land by oil companies; from a small group of mysterious Germans who took refuge on an unpopulated Galapagos island during the lead-up to the Second World War, to a night with the husband of Ecuador's most infamous expat, Lorena Bobbit, this series of cracked "family portraits" provides a cast of heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what's happened: they've learned a great deal more about a country whose more well known exports -- soccer, coffee and cocoa--mask a much more intriguing national story that's ripe for the telling"--
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry! Winner of a 2022 Palestine Book Award“Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha’s accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."—The New York TimesIn this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.Accompanied by an in-depth interview (conducted by Ammiel Alcalay) in which Abu Toha discusses life in Gaza, his family origins, and how he came to poetry.Praise for Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear:“Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishingly gifted young poet from Gaza, almost a seer with his eloquent lyrical vernacular … His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life.”—Naomi Shihab Nye“Though forged in the bleak landscape of Gaza, he conjures a radiance that echoes Miłosz and Kabir. These poems are like flowers that grow out of bomb craters and Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishing talent to celebrate.”—Mary Karr"Mosab Abu Toha's Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear arrives with such refreshing clarity and voice amidst a sea of immobilizing self-consciousness. It is no great feat to say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but here is a poet who says it plain: 'In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.' Later, 'This is how we survived.' It’s remarkable. This is poetry of the highest order."—Kaveh Akbar
Is it possible to create a borderless world? How might it be better equipped to solve the global emergencies threatening our collective survival? Build Bridges, Not Walls is an inspiring, impassioned call to envision-and work toward-a bold new reality.
The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end.
Essays on racial flashpoints, white denial, violence, and the manipulation of fears in America today.
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