Out of Place: A Memoir, by Edward Said Edward Said, the prolific author, political activist, pianist, and critic who would have been eighty-two yesterday, rose to academic stardom in 1978 with the publication of Orientalism, the seminal critique of the cultural bias that founded the Western study of Eastern culture. […]
my name on his tongue, by Laila Halaby In her first book of poetry, published in 2012, Halaby mines issues of identity, geography and the dislocation that comes from inhabiting two worlds. Halaby, the author of two novels, and recipient of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award, calls this volume a memoir […]
The Almond Tree Michelle Cohen Corasanti Garnet Publishing Publication Date: September 30, 2012 ISBN 978-1-859643-297 It is so easy to dismiss conflict and strife when it’s halfway across the world. It’s also easy to read about strife and conflict when you know it’s not real, when you can regulate it […]
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Alice Walker has refused to allow The Color Purple to be translated in protest of the treatment of the Palestinians. Walker sent a letter “to the publisher, Yediot Books, a copy of which was published with her permission on the website of the Palestinian Campaign for […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.