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Aslan, a University of California, Riverside, creative writing professor, offers an anthology of Middle Eastern literature of the 20th century, drawn from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu. Given its provenance-Aslan authored the best-selling No god but God, Norton is brilliant at anthologies, and there's sponsorship by Words Without Borders, which promotes international writing-this looks to be the book to have on this subject if you can have only one. With a four-city tour.
A landmark literary event, this groundbreaking work spans a century of literature by the region's best writers-from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk-all of them bound together not by borders and nationalities but by a common experience of colonial domination and western imperialism.
As best-selling author Reza Aslan writes, the mesmerizing prose of the Middle East-Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu-has been virtually excluded from the canon available to English readers. Under the umbrella of Words Without Borders, Aslan has assembled this extraordinary collection of short stories, memoirs, essays, and poems, featuring both contemporary and historical works, with many of the selections newly appearing in English. Featuring literature from countries as diverse as Morocco and Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, Tablet & Pen is a long-awaited work that is to be devoured as a single sustained narrative from the first page to the last.
A volume that celebrates the magnificent achievement of twentieth-century Middle Eastern literature that has been neglected in the English-speaking world.
