Trade Books for Courses :: Trade Books For Courses: Literature World: Africa & Middle East Books

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GraceLand

A Novel

Chris Abani Picador

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

"GraceLand amply demonstrates that Abani has the energy, ambition, and compassion to create a novel that delineates and illuminates a complicated, dynamic, deeply fractured society."—Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - Nominee - Fiction
L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist - Fiction
Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Nominee - Winner - First Fiction
Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award - Winner - First Fiction
Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Finalist - Winner - Debut Fiction

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A Long Way Gone

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah Sarah Crichton Books

"What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? . . . The great benefit of Ishmael Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone, is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah's autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine—perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the pubescent (or even prepubescent) warrior-killer . . . A Long Way Gone is his first, remarkable book. . . . Beah's memoir joins an elite class of writing: Africans witnessing African wars . . . A Long Way Gone makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact. Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen."—William Boyd, The New York Times Book Review

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Born Under a Million Shadows

A Novel

Andrea Busfield Holt Paperbacks

"Former journalist Busfield first traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban. Her first novel presents the aftermath of that event through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy . . . Readers who like to explore other cultures and current events through fiction will find here an intriguing picture of contemporary Afghanistan. Extras for book clubs are appended."—Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community College, Library Journal

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Waltz with Bashir

A Lebanon War Story

Ari Folman and David Polonsky Metropolitan Books

"Some memories are like the rubble in a city strafed and scarred by war. Reconnoitering into the past, we pick through the debris, eager to know old truths but fearful of what we may find. Some people choose psychoanalysis to make this treacherous journey . . . Ari Folman did it with Waltz with Bashir . . . The message of the futility of war has rarely been painted with such bold strokes."—Mary Corliss, Time magazine

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Hardcover :
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An Elegy for Easterly

Stories

Petina Gappah Faber and Faber, Inc.

"Petina Gappah's stories range from scathing satire of Zimbabwe's ruling elite to earthy comedy to sensitive accounts of the sufferings of humble victims of the regime. Gappah is a fine writer and a rising star of Zimbabwean literature."—J. M. Coetzee

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Get a Life

A Novel

Nadine Gordimer Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"[Natalie Gordimer] is a most worldly writer, engaged for many years in South Africa's sulfurous politics, and those politics often find their way into her fiction. Yet her stories manage to avoid the narrative death rattle of the political novelist; they live on their own, free of propaganda. The working world is never far below the surface of Gordimer's books, existing side by side—sometimes easily, sometimes not—with the sexual life, all of it within the distinctive milieu of South Africa, though that nation has many aspects of a universal human condition. She is a writer of exceptional poise, writing tight, with ruffles and flourishes kept to a minimum . . . This novel begins superbly and ends wonderfully, and in between there are passages of high intelligence, not without Gordimer's signature asperity."—Ward Just, The Washington Post Book World

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Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

And Other Stories

Nadine Gordimer Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"[This] newest collection of stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, finds Gordimer poking at embers of the fire that has fueled her work since the very beginning, more than half a century ago: politics, both racial and sexual; our responsibilities to unknown (and perhaps unknowable) others; and, especially, the dangers of delving into history without adequate preparation . . . Nadine Gordimer is more interesting, and provocative, than most."—The Washington Post

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The Girl on the Fridge

Stories

Etgar Keret; Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

"Keret may be the most important writer working in Israel right now; certainly he is the closest observer of its post-intifada, post-Oslo spiritual condition. And astonishingly, he is also the Israeli writer closest to the literary tradition of pre-Israel, pre-Holocaust European Jewry . . . Kafka said that literature should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us. Keret is a writer wailing at the ice with a Wiffle ball bat."—Stephen Marche, The Forward

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Gate of the Sun

Elias Khoury; Translated by Humphrey Davies Picador

"Readers can no longer pretend that Palestine is merely a fugitive state of mind, a convenient Arab myth, a traumatic tribal memory, and somebody else's problem. This remarkable novel out of Lebanon, a skillful reshuffling of the 1001 Nights with a doctor in a refugee camp playing the part of Scheherazade, fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."—John Leonard, Harper's Magazine

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Trade Paperback : $13.00 Buy	City Gates Elias Khoury; Translated by Paula Haydar Picador Drawing on the traditions of Arabic storytelling, Elias Khoury's fable of displacement, first published in Arabic in 1981, follows a stranger as he arrives in a gated city and wanders through its labyrinthine streets in search of the city's future—and his own.

Trade Paperback : $14.00 Buy	The Journey of Little Gandhi Elias Khoury; Translated by Paula Haydar Picador "How to tell the story of a city [Beirut] that has changed from the Switzerland of the East, to its Hong Kong, then its Saigon, and finally its Calcutta. [Elias Khoury] has succeeded, as only a great novelist can do."—Le Monde

Trade Paperback : $16.00 Buy	Yalo A Novel Elias Khoury Picador “In Lebanon, there is passion and there is blood. Elias Khoury’s new novel, Yalo, heavy with both, is a dizzying journey into the extremes of human experience—into the intense sensuality and stomach-turning violence."—Adam LeBor, The New York Times Book Review

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Ways of Dying

A Novel

Zakes Mda Picador

"[A] marvelous picaresque . . . Mda's purpose comes through clearly: to show how many ways of dying there are in the transition to a new South Africa, whether through the brutality of white overseers and policemen or that of black gangsters . . . Reflecting the startling contrasts in such a world, tender humor and brutal violence vie with each other in Mda's pages, as do vibrant life and sudden death. The struggle between them creates an energetic and refreshing literature for a country still coming to terms with both the new and the old."—Tony Eprile, The New York Times Book Review

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The Heart of Redness

A Novel

Zakes Mda Picador

"Bewitching . . . [An] inspired synthesis of history, myth and satire . . . and about post-apartheid South Africa by extension . . . Luxuriantly steeped in African customs . . . [Mda is] one of his country's most trenchant current voices."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Finalist - Winner - Fiction
Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Winner - Fiction

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Awards

Trade Paperback : $15.00 Buy	She Plays with the Darkness A Novel Zakes Mda Picador Winner of the Sanlam Literary Award for Best Unpublished Novel "Beautiful [and] thoughtful."—Carolyn See, The Washington Post

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The Madonna of Excelsior

A Novel

Zakes Mda Picador

An American Library Association Notable Book

"As South Africa's political imperatives have shifted, so too have those of Mda's fiction. No longer fixated on apartheid's horrors and its wished-for end, his work now examines the difficulties of transition: bourgeois decadence and the abandonment of revolutionary principles . . . the many dark shadows of political freedom. The Madonna of Excelsior [is] among the most profound and revealing portraits of life in post-apartheid South Africa. Mda succeeds in creating a South African present of compromise, bitten anger, hypocrisy, and conflicting perspective . . . Perhaps his best work."—Benjamin Austen, Harper's

ALA Notable Books - Winner - Nominee - Fiction
Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Finalist - Fiction
Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Nominee - Fiction

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The Whale Caller

A Novel

Zakes Mda Picador

"Zakes Mda's fifth novel, The Whale Caller, is an oddball love story, wonderfully timeless and familiar . . . With an offhanded mastery of lyrical language, this gifted storyteller's prose shimmers without extravagance. As if awash in unremitting sun, The Whale Caller begins as a reverie, illuminating the beauty of imperfect love and the thrill of struggling to maintain it. Yet in the end, beyond the whimsy and whales, the deeper, darker concern here is not so much the fragility of love, but the fragility of life itself when one surrenders wholly to the foolish heart."—The Washington Post Book World

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Cion

A Novel

Zakes Mda Picador

"Takes the traditional pattern of a picaresque novel—an episodic recounting of roguish schemes gone awry—and decorates it with a richly textured overlay of embroidery, applique, collage and found art . . . Mda writes about hardscrabble lives without dwelling on the hardscrabble . . . Mda's elegant patchwork of clever storytelling, wry characterization and good-natured humor is more than enough."—John R. Alden, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

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Butterfly Burning

A Novel

Yvonne Vera Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

"A remarkable novel . . . Keen, vivid. The author's political sense, her critique of colonialism, is intrinsic, never intrusive . . . Vera writes gracefully, depicting with extraordinary elegance the chaos and disorder of township life, the surreal conditions of existence imposed by colonial authority upon the residents."—Michelle Cliff, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

Trade Paperback : $15.00 Buy	The Poet Game A Novel Salar Abdoh Picador In the wake of the first World Trade Center bombing, New York City is the center of an intricate web of betrayals and double-crosses in the shadowy world of...

Trade Paperback : $16.00 Buy	Out of Egypt A Memoir André Aciman Picador This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three...

Trade Paperback : $15.00 Buy	Passage to Ararat Michael J. Arlen; Introduction by Geoffrey Wolff Farrar, Straus and Giroux In Passage to Ararat, which received the National Book Award in 1976, Michael J. Arlen goes beyond the portrait of his father, the famous Anglo-Armenian...

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Nylon Road

A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran

Parsua Bashi St. Martin's Griffin

"What [Nylon Road] really reveals is how little the two cultures really know about each other, let alone being able to understand and sympathize with each other. It’s an eye-opening book, particularly in the treatment of women in Iran . . . But while portraying these events from her past, Bashi also speaks up about ways in which Europeans or Americans are insensitive or unfair . . . The book is worth reading, if for no other reason than that there’s very little like this, and it takes guts to describe a difficult life with such honesty and candor. If everyone had access to more books like Nylon Road, then perhaps we would have an easier time taking somebody else’s perspective into account."—Jonathan Liu, Wired

Trade Paperback : $14.00 Buy	The Smell of Apples A Novel Mark Behr Picador Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times Winner of the M-Net Award Winner of The Eugene Marais Award Winner of the...