Rain Over Baghdad

What was it like to live in Iraq before the earth-shaking events of the end of the twentieth century? The mid seventies to the late eighties witnessed Saddam Hussein's rise to power, the establishment of Kurdish autonomy in the north, and the Iraq-Iran war. It also brought an influx of oil wealth, following the 1973 war and the spike in oil prices, and a parallel influx of Arab talent, including many Egyptians, as the Egyptian left became disenchanted with Sadat. The massive migration also extended to workers and peasants, some of whom created an entire Egyptian village just outside Baghdad. We witness all of this and more through the eyes of an Egyptian woman married to an engineer working in Iraq. The narrator, who works for an Egyptian magazine's bureau in the Iraqi capital, has a behind-the-scenes view of what was really happening at a critical juncture in the history of the region. Moreover, she has a mystery to solve: an Iraqi woman from the marshes in the south of Iraq, who is also a communist journalist, has disappeared, and as the mystery unfolds we learn of her love for an older Egyptian Marxist journalist. This is Iraq before and beyond Saddam, Iraq as the Arabs knew it, in the lives of interesting people living in a vibrant country before the attempted annexation of Kuwait and the American invasion. This is the Iraq that was

In Baghdad, Iraq, in 1939, nine-year-old Heskel Haddad, then the most fervent of Iraqi nationalists, first heard a fellow Iraqi call him "lousy Jew." Iraq, which for centuries was called Babylon, housed the world's oldest continuing Jewish community, largely concentrated in the capital city of Baghdad. By the late 1930's spurred by pro-Nazi elements, the Arab community had become increasingly anti-Semitic. On the eve of the holy day of Shuvuot, small roving bands of M'silmin killed 900 Jews in Baghdad, among them Heskel Haddad's cousin, his closest friend, who had been stabbed in the back and left to die in slow agony. Heskel Haddad swore the solemn oath to avenge his cousin, and began to organize an underground movement to protect his fellow Jews from further slaughter. As conditions worsened in Iraq, more and more Jews dreamed of escaping to Israel, but attempts to flee through Syria and Trans-Jordan meant death in the desert or at the hands of the Bedouin. The only way out was into neighboring Persia, now called Iran. Between 1948 and 1950, the Underground led 20,000 Jews to safety. An anonymous informer put Haddad on the "wanted list," and eventually Haddad was forced to leave Iraq forever. After a grueling journey through the desert into Iran, Haddad was forced to leave Iraq forever. After a grueling journey through the desert into Iran, Haddad arrived in Israel, where he was reunited with his family, which had left Iraq penniless as a result of the mass expulsion of Jews. Born in Baghdad is a gripping, richly atmospheric book about exotic lands poised between ancient tradition and modern change--and about the human values that must ultimately transcend both.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BRIDPORT NOVEL AWARD In beautifully rendered prose, a mother and a daughter struggle as outsiders in Baghdad and London in this intergenerational drama set against a background of political tension and intrigue “Who would be charmed by tales of life in the beautiful old house on the banks of the Tigris—looted now no doubt, its shutters torn and the courtyard strewn with mattresses?” One night in 2003, Anglo-Iraqi psychiatrist Mona Haddad has a surprise visitor to her London office, an old acquaintance Duncan Claybourne. But why has he come? Will his confession finally lay bare what happened to her family before they escaped Iraq? Their stories begin in 1937, when Mona’s mother Diane, a lively Englishwoman newly married to Ibrahim, an ambitious Iraqi doctor, meets Duncan by chance. Diane is working as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family. Duncan is a young British Embassy officer in Baghdad. When the king dies in a mysterious accident, Ibrahim and his family suspect Diane of colluding with Duncan and the British. Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad, Elizabeth Loudon’s richly evocative story of one family calls into question British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage and the lives of women caught between different worlds.

One of NPR's Best Books of 2017! A groundbreaking anthology of science fiction from Iraq that will challenge your perception of what it means to be “The Other” “History is a hostage, but it will bite through the gag you tie around its mouth, bite through and still be heard.”—Operation Daniel In a calm and serene world, one has the luxury of imagining what the future might look like. Now try to imagine that future when your way of life has been devastated by forces beyond your control. Iraq + 100 poses a question to Iraqi writers (those who still live in that nation, and those who have joined the worldwide diaspora): What might your home country look like in the year 2103, a century after a disastrous foreign invasion? Using science fiction, allegory, and magical realism to challenge the perception of what it means to be “The Other”, this groundbreaking anthology edited by Hassan Blasim contains stories that are heartbreakingly surreal, and yet utterly recognizable to the human experience. Though born out of exhaustion, fear, and despair, these stories are also fueled by themes of love, family, and endurance, and woven through with a delicate thread of hope for the future. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Last Tango in Baghdad is an inspirational memoir depicting a painstakingly true tale of a fascinating life lived in turbulent times and countries of the Middle East. This story, so reminiscent of the experiences of Jews in the past, is extraordinary. Readers are delighted by the humorous and saddened by the terrible injustices Dr. Khabbaza encountered throughout his life. Providing some background and an understanding of the culture, the author examines the political facts and reveals in detail the events that shaped his life. Reading this book will inspire you and entertain you as well. It is highly recommended for all non-specialist general readers for its revealing content and valuable insight.

Collected in entirety for the very first time, this study reflects more than 25 years of close contact with the Sufi Masters of Central Anatolia, with most of that time spent in the presence of the peerless Sufi teacher, Mr. Ahmet Kayhan. Out of the author's association with this personality has emerged this in-depth look at the famous and mysterious Oral Tradition of Sufism. Covered topics include the concepts of compassion and mercy, universality, ethics, faith, charity, destiny, death and the afterlife, and more. Combining the rigor of anthropology with the devotion of a disciple, this book faithfully lays bare the comprehensive teachings of the man who may be the Sufi Saint of the Age.

Examines how authoritarian regimes employ labour emigration in order to remain in power, both in Egypt and beyond.

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Waïl S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

Artificial intelligence has been utilized in a diverse range of industries as more people and businesses discover its many uses and applications. A current field of study that requires more attention, as there is much opportunity for improvement, is the use of artificial intelligence within literary works and social media analysis. The Handbook of Research on Artificial Intelligence Applications in Literary Works and Social Media presents contemporary developments in the adoption of artificial intelligence in textual analysis of literary works and social media and introduces current approaches, techniques, and practices in data science that are implemented to scrap and analyze text data. This book initiates a new multidisciplinary field that is the combination of artificial intelligence, data science, social science, literature, and social media study. Covering key topics such as opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and machine learning, this reference work is ideal for computer scientists, industry professionals, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

In This Is Not a Copy, Kaja Marczewska identifies a characteristic 'copy-paste' tendency in contemporary culture-a shift in attitude that allows reproduction and plagiarizing to become a norm in cultural production. This inclination can be observed in literature and non-literary forms of writing at an unprecedented level, as experiments with text redefine the nature of creativity. Responding to these transformations, Marczewska argues that we must radically rethink our conceptions of artistic practice and proposes a move away from the familiar categories of copying and originality, creativity and plagiarism in favour of the notion of iteration. Developing the new concept of the Iterative Turn, This Is Not a Copy identifies and theorizes the turn toward ubiquitous iteration as a condition of text-based creative practices as they emerge in response to contemporary technologies. Conceiving of writing as iterative invites us to address a set of new, critical questions about contemporary culture. Combining discussion of literature, experimental and electronic writing, mainstream and independent publishing with debates in 20th- and 21st-century art, contemporary media culture, transforming technologies and copyright laws, This Is Not a Copy offers a timely and urgently needed argument, introducing a unique new perspective on practices that permeate our contemporary culture.

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR PUBLISHING TRIANGLE'S EDMUND WHITE DEBUT FICTION AWARD In the last weeks of her pregnancy, a Muslim Indian lesbian living in San Francisco receives a visit from her estranged mother and sister that surfaces long held secrets and betrayals in this "sweeping family saga . . . with the beautiful specificity of real lives lived, loved, and fought for" (Entertainment Weekly) Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children. But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love—a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself. Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.

Opinion mining and text analytics are used widely across numerous disciplines and fields in today’s society to provide insight into people’s thoughts, feelings, and stances. This data is incredibly valuable and can be utilized for a range of purposes. As such, an in-depth look into how opinion mining and text analytics correlate with social media and literature is necessary to better understand audiences. The Handbook of Research on Opinion Mining and Text Analytics on Literary Works and Social Media introduces the use of artificial intelligence and big data analytics applied to opinion mining and text analytics on literary works and social media. It also focuses on theories, methods, and approaches in which data analysis techniques can be used to analyze data to provide a meaningful pattern. Covering a wide range of topics such as sentiment analysis and stance detection, this publication is ideal for lecturers, researchers, academicians, practitioners, and students.

The Englishwoman Gertrude Bell lived an extraordinary life. Her adventures are the stuff of novels: she rode with bandits; braved desert shamals; was captured by Bedouins; and sojourned in a harem. Called the most powerful woman in the British Empire, she counseled kings and prime ministers. Bell’s colleagues included Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who in 1921 invited Bell—the only woman whose advice was sought—to the Cairo Conference to "determine the future of Mesopotamia." Bell numbered among her closest friends T.E. Lawrence, St. John Philby, and Arabian sheiks. In this volume of three of her notebooks, Rosemary O’Brien preserves Bell’s elegant, vibrant prose, and presents Bell as a brilliant tactician fearlessly confronting her own vulnerability. The fundamental themes of her life—reckless behavior; a divided self which combined brilliance of intellect with a passionate nature; a sense of history; and the fatal gift of falling in love with a married man—are all here in remarkable detail. Her journey to northern Arabia in 1914 earned Bell professional recognition from the Royal Geographical Society, and solidified her reputation as a canny political analyst of Middle Eastern affairs. In addition to Bell’s own photographs, O’Brien has provided us an unprecedented first access to excerpts of the Bell/Richard Doughty-Wyllie love letters, the married British army officer with whom she was in love and for whom her diaries were written.

A powerful new examination of the performative that asks “what’s next?” for this well-worn concept From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force. Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.

Zainab Salbi was eleven years old when her father was chosen to be Saddam Hussein's personal pilot and her family's life was grafted onto his. Her mother, the beautiful Alia, taught her daughter the skills she needed to survive. A plastic smile. Saying yes. Burying in boxes in her mind the horrors she glimpsed around her. "Learn to erase your memories," she instructed. "He can read eyes." In this richly visual memoir, Salbi describes tyranny as she saw it - through the eyes of a privileged child, a rebellious teenager, a violated wife, and ultimately a public figure fighting to overcome the skill that once kept her alive: silence. Between Two Worlds is a riveting quest for truth that deepens our understanding of the universal themes of power, fear, sexual subjugation, and the question one generation asks the one before it: How could you have let this happen to us?

Charles Bernstein has described conceptual "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such as Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilities of non-expressive language. --Book Jacket.