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About this Guide
This Research Guide will help you find Arabic language and literature resources available thru the BU Libraries. Here you will find information on:
- Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
- Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
- Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
- Related programs at Boston University
New Books -- Recent Acquisitions
No One Prayed over Their Graves by
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED FICTION "Gorgeous . . . Lush, elegiac [and] Márquezian . . . A novel of abundance and generosity." --Sarah Cypher, The Washington Post "Richly embroidered . . . [Khalifa's] galloping narration restores life and soul to a city that has become a byword for devastation." --The Economist From the National Book Award finalist Khaled Khalifa, the story of two friends whose lives are altered by a flood that devastates their Syrian village. On a December morning in 1907, two close friends, Hanna and Zakariya, return to their village near Aleppo after a night of drunken carousing in the city, only to discover that there has been a massive flood. Their neighbors, families, children--nearly all of them are dead. Their homes, shops, and places of worship are leveled. Their lives will never be the same. Hanna was once a wealthy libertine, a landowner who built a famed citadel devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and excess. But with the loss of his home, wife, and community, he transforms, becoming an ascetic mystic obsessed with death and the meaning of life. In No One Prayed Over Their Graves, we follow Hanna's life before and after the flood, tracing friendships, loves and lusts, family and business, until he is just one thread in the rich tapestry of Aleppo. Khaled Khalifa weaves a sweeping tale of life and death in the hubbub of Aleppine society at the turn of the twentieth century. No One Prayed Over Their Graves is a portrait of a people on the verge of great change--from provincial villages to the burgeoning modernity of the city, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews live and work together, united in their love for Aleppo and their dreams for the future.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PJ7942.H343 L3613 2023Publication Date: 2023
Post-Arab Spring Narratives: A Minor Literature in the Making by
This book looks at eight post Arab Spring novels in the context of Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's theory of minor literature. Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Karim Alrawi, Youssef Rakha, Yasmine El Rashidi, Omar Rober Hamilton, Saleem Haddad, and Nada Awar Jarrar all focus on the Arab world in their work; on the lives of ordinary and minority peoples; and on the revolutions of their respective nations. This volume shows how these contemporary Anglo-Arab novelists exhibit linguistic experimentation akin to Deleuze's and Guattari's theory of 'deterritorialization', but in a way that is unique to Anglo-Arab writing. The selected novelists repudiate the use of metamorphosis, which is usually an essential part of the deterritorialization of a major language. Instead, their writings enact the minor practice of linguistic deterritorialization by using metaphor and by incorporating contemporary modes of protest like popular slogans, tweets, and chants. These authors challenge the conventions of minor literature and, by adopting this mode of deterritorialization, foreground the experiences of officially silenced voices.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
The Migrant in Arab Literature: Displacement, Self-Discovery and Nostalgia by
This edited book offers a collection of fresh and critical essays that explore the representation of the migrant subject in modern and contemporary Arabic literature and discuss its role in shaping new forms of transcultural and transnational identities. The selection of essays in this volume offers a set of new insights on a cluster of tropes: self-discovery, alienation, nostalgia, transmission and translation of knowledge, sense of exile, reconfiguration of the relationship with the past and the identity, and the building of transnational identity. A coherent yet multi-faceted narrative of micro-stories and of transcultural and transnational Arab identities will emerge from the essays: the volume aims at reversing the traditional perspective according to which a migrant subject is a non-political actor. In contrast to many books about migration and literature, this one explores how the migrant subject becomes a specific literary trope, a catalyst of modern alienation, displacement, and uncertain identity, suggesting new forms of subjectification. Multiple representations of the migrant subject inform and perform the possibility of new post- national and transcultural individual and group identities and actively contribute to rewriting and decolonizing history.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
The Bird Tattoo by
A powerful and sweeping novel set over two tumultuous decades in Iraq from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Beekeeper. Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Helen is a young Yazidi woman, living with her family in a mountain village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. One day she finds a local bird caught in a trap, and frees it, just as the trapper, Elias, returns. At first angry, he soon sees the error of his ways and vows never to keep a bird captive again. Helen and Elias fall deeply in love, marry and start a family in Sinjar. The village has seemed to stand apart from time, protected by the mountains and too small to attract much political notice. But their happy existence is suddenly shattered when Elias, a journalist, goes missing. A brutal organization is sweeping over the land, infiltrating even the remotest corners, its members cloaking their violence in religious devotion. Helen's search for her husband results in her own captivity and enslavement. She eventually escapes her captors and is reunited with some of her family. But her life is forever changed. Elias remains missing and her sons, now young recruits to the organization, are like strangers. Will she find harmony and happiness again? For readers of Elif Shafak, Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay, or Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, Dunya Mikhail's The Bird Tattoo chronicles a world of great upheaval, love and loss, beauty and horror, and will stay in readers' minds long after the last page.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
The Men Who Swallowed the Sun by
Winner of the 2022 Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Abu Golayyel's gritty tale of two men's ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East and the cities of Europe is pure storytelling Two Bedouin men from Egypt's Western Desert seek to escape poverty through different routes. One--the intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdi--gets no further than southern Libya's fly-blown oasis of Sabha, while his cousin--the dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raider--makes it to the fleshpots of Milan. The backdrop of this darkly comic and unsentimental story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafi's rickety, rhetoric-propped Great State of the Masses, where "the Leader" fantasizes of welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin. Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is an unforgettable novel of two men and their fellow migrants and the extreme marginalization that drives them.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures by
The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar. This book offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes. It also explores areas that were left untouched, like the decolonization of the Arabian Nights, and its archaeologies. Unique in its excavation into inroads of perception and reception, Muhsin J. al-Musawi's book unearths means of connection with common publics and learned societies. Al-Musawi shows, as never before, how the Arabian Nights has been translated, appropriated, and authenticated or abused over time, and how its reach is so expansive as to draw the attention of poets, painters, illustrators, translators, editors, musicians, political scientists like Leo Strauss, and novelists like Michel Butor, James Joyce and Marcel Proust amongst others. Making use of documentaries, films, paintings, novels and novellas, poetry, digital forums and political jargon, this book offers nuanced understanding of the perennial charm and power of this collection.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
