Manshurat Al Jamal was founded in 1983 by Khalid Al Maaly in Cologne ,in 2008 based in Beirut and a further branch in Bagdad .The program focus on :- Classic ,Modern Arab literature- Fiction short stories poems - Philosophy- Sociology Manshurat Al-Jamal is the publisher of a lot of authors: G.Grass O. Pamuk J. Habermas Robert Musil H.Qureishi G. Sinoue P. Celan W. Gombrowicz J. Derrida M. Horkheimer T. Adorno A. Kristof
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Manilla Press is a home for novelists, journalists, memoirists, thinkers, dreamers, influencers. Our reach is international, our range broad, we publish with focus, passion and conviction, and we seek to find and publish underrepresented voices.
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Featuring new essays by established and emerging scholars, Intersections: Women artists/surrealism/modernism redefines conventional surrealist and modernist canons by focusing critical attention on women artists working in and with surrealism in the context of modernism. In doing so it redefines critical understanding of the complex relations between all three terms. The essays address work produced in a wide variety of international contexts and across several generations of surrealist production by women closely connected to the surrealist movement or more marginally influenced by it. Intersections explores work in a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to film and fashion, by artists including Susan Hiller, Maya Deren, Birgit Jurgenssen, Aube Elléouët, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, Elsa Schiaparelli, Joyce Mansour, Leonor Fini, Mimi Parent, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar.
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Kuwaiti children’s book author Lateefa Buti’s well-crafted and beautifully illustrated children’s book, Hatless, encourages children (ages 6-9) to think independently and challenge rigid traditions and fixed rituals with innovation and creativity. The main character is a young girl named Hatless who lives in the City of Hats. Here, all of the people are born with hats that cover their heads and faces. The world inside of their hats is dark, silent, and odorless. Hatless feels trapped underneath her own hat. She wants to take off her hat, but she is afraid, until she realizes that whatever frightening things exist in the world around her are there whether or not she takes off her hat to see them. So Hatless removes her hat. As Hatless takes in the beauty of her surroundings, she cannot help but talk about what she sees, hears, and smells. The other inhabitants of the city ostracize her because she has become different from them. It is not long before they ask her to leave the City of Hats. Rather than giving up or getting angry, Hatless feels sad for her friends and neighbors who are afraid to experience the world outside of their hats. She comes up with an ingenious solution: if given another chance, she will wear a hat as long it is one she makes herself. The people of the City of Hats agree, so Hatless weaves a hat that covers her head and face but does not prevent her from seeing the outside world. She offers to loan the hat to the other inhabitants of the city. One by one, they try it on and are enchanted by the beautiful world around them. Since then, no child has been born wearing a hat. The people celebrate by tossing their old hats in the air. By bravely embracing these values, Hatless improves her own life and the lives of her fellow citizens. Buti’s language is eloquent and clear. She strikes a skilled narrative balance between revealing Hatless’s inner thoughts and letting the story unfold through her interactions with other characters. Careful descriptions are accompanied by beautiful illustrations that reward multiple readings of the book.
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Adopting the story-within-a-story structure of Arabian Nights, author Osama Alaysa weaves together a collection of stories portraying centuries of oppression endured by the Palestinian people. This remarkable novel eloquently brings together fictional characters alongside real-life historical figures in a complex portrayal of Bethlehem and the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the West Bank. The common thread connecting each tale is madness, in all its manifestations. Psychological madness, in the sense of clinical mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, finds expression alongside acts of social and political madness. Together, these accounts of individuals and communities provide a gateway into the histories of the city of Bethlehem and Palestine. They paint a picture of the centuries of political oppression that the Palestinian people have endured, from the days of the Ottoman Empire to the years following the Oslo Accords, and all the way to 2012 (when the novel was written). The novel is divided into three sections, each containing multiple narratives. The first section, “The Book of a Genesis,” describes the physical spaces and origins of Bethlehem and Dheisheh Refugee Camp. These stories span the 19th and 20th centuries, transitioning smoothly from one tale to another to offer an intricate interpretation of the identity of these places. The second section, “The Book of the People Without a Book”, follows parallel narratives of the lives of the patients in a psychiatric hospital in Bethlehem, the mad men and women roaming the streets of the city, and those imprisoned by the Israeli authorities. All suffer abuse, but they also reaffirm their humanity through the relationships, romantic and otherwise, that they form. The third and final section, “An Ephemeral Book,” follows individuals—Palestinian and non-Palestinian—who are afflicted by madness following the Oslo Accords in 1993. These stories give voice to the perspectives of the long-marginalized Palestinian population, narrating the loss of land and the accompanying loss of sanity in the decades of despair and violence that followed the Nakba, the 1948 eviction of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. The novel’s mad characters—politicians, presidents, doctors, intellectuals, ordinary people and, yes, Dheisheh and Bethlehem themselves—burst out of their narrative threads, flowing from one story into the next. Alaysa’s crisp, lucid prose and deft storytelling chart a clear path through the chaos with dark humor and wit. The result is an important contribution to fiction on the Palestinian crisis that approaches the Palestinians, madness, and Palestinian spaces with compassion and depth.
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In his first YA novel, cultural journalist and author Abdo Wazen writes about a blind teenager in Lebanon who finds strength and friendship among an unlikely group. Growing up in a small Lebanese village, Bassim’s blindness limits his engagement with the materials taught in his schools. Despite his family’s love and support, his opportunities seem limited. So at thirteen years old, Bassim leaves his village to join the Institute for the Blind in a Beirut suburb. There, he comes alive. He learns Braille and discovers talents he didn’t know he had. Bassim is empowered by his newfound abilities to read and write. Thanks to his newly developed self-confidence, Bassim decides to take a risk and submit a short story to a competition sponsored by the Ministry of Education. After winning the competition, he is hired to work at the Institute for the Blind. At the Institute, Bassim, a Sunni Muslim, forms a strong friendship with George, a Christian. Cooperation and collective support are central to the success of each student at the Institute, a principle that overcomes religious differences. In the book, the Institute comes to symbolize the positive changes that tolerance can bring to the country and society at large. The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air is also a book about Lebanon and its treatment of people with disabilities. It offers insight into the vital role of strong family support in individual success, the internal functioning of institutions like the Institute, as well as the unique religious and cultural environment of Beirut. Wazen’s lucid language and the linear structure he employs result in a coherent and easy-to-read narrative. The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air is an important contribution to a literature in which people with disabilities are underrepresented. In addition to offering a story of empowerment and friendship, this book also aims to educate readers about people with disabilities and shed light on the indispensable roles played by institutions like the Institute.
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Inspired by the life story of Palestinian artist, Tamam Al-Akhal, The Lilac Girl is the sixth book for younger readers by award-winning author, Ibtisam Barakat. The Lilac Girl is a beautifully illustrated short story relating the departure of Palestinian artist and educator, Tamam Al-Akhal, from her homeland, Jaffa. It portrays Tamam as a young girl who dreams about returning to her home, which she has been away from for 70 years, since the Palestinian exodus. Tamam discovers that she is talented in drawing, so she uses her imagination to draw her house in her mind. She decides one night to visit it, only to find another girl there, who won’t allow her inside and shuts the door in her face. Engulfed in sadness, Tamam sits outside and starts drawing her house on a piece of paper. As she does so, she notices that the colors of her house have escaped and followed her; the girl attempts to return the colors but in vain. Soon the house becomes pale and dull, like the nondescript hues of bare trees in the winter. Upon Tamam’s departure, she leaves the entire place drenched in the color of lilac. As a children’s story, The Lilac Girl works on multiple levels, educating with its heart-rending narrative but without preaching, accurately expressing the way Palestinians must have felt by not being allowed to return to their homeland. As the story’s central character, Tamam succeeds on certain levels in defeating the occupying forces and intruders through her yearning, which is made manifest through the power of imaginary artistic expression. In her mind she draws and paints a picture of hope, with colors escaping the physical realm of her former family abode, showing that they belong, not to the invaders, but the rightful occupiers of that dwelling. Far from being the only person to have lost their home and endured tremendous suffering, Tamam’s plight is representative of millions of people both then and now, emphasizing the notion that memories of our homeland live with us for eternity, no matter how far we are from them in a physical sense. The yearning to return home never subsides, never lessens with the passing of time but, with artistic expression, it is possible to find freedom and create beauty out of pain.
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An egg has hatched, and what comes out of it? A chicken? No. A turtle? No. It’s a dinosaur. But where is his family? The little dinosaur searches the animal kingdom for someone who looks like him and settles on the giraffe. In this picture book by educator and author Hessa Al Muhairi, with illustrations by Sura Ghazwan, a dinosaur sets out in search of animals like him. He finds plenty of animals, but none that look the same...until he meets the giraffe. This story explores identity and belonging and teaches children about accepting differences in carefully crafted language.
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‘In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat’ is a book that traces the life of an unknown Egyptian writer who died in 1963, four years before the release of her only novel. The book does not follow a traditional style to present the biography of Al-Zayyat, or to restore consideration for a writer who was denied her rights. Mersal refuses to present a single story as if it is the truth and refuses to speak on behalf of the heroine or deal with her as a victim, but rather takes us on a journey to search for the individuality that is often marginalised in Arab societies. The book searches for a young woman whose family burned all her personal documents, including the draft of her second novel, and was completely absent in the collective archives. The narration derives its uniqueness from its ability to combine different literary genres such as fictional narration, academic research, investigation, readings, interviews, fiction, and fragments of the autobiography of the author of the novel. The book deals with the differences between the individuality of Enayat, who was born into an aristocratic family, graduated from a German school and wrote her narration during the domination of the speeches of the Nasserism period, and that of Mersal, a middle-class woman who formed her consciousness in the 1990s and achieved some of what Enayat dreamed of achieving but remained haunted by her tragedy. The book deals with important political, social and cultural issues, as we read the history of psychiatry in modern Egypt through the pills that Enayat swallowed to end her life on 3 January 1963, while her divorce summarises the continuing suffering of women with the Personal Status Law. We also see how the disappearance of a small square from her neighbourhood reveals the relationship between modernity and bureaucracy, and how the geography of Cairo changes, obliterated as the result of changes in political regimes. In the library of the German Archaeological Institute, where Enayat worked, we find an unwritten history of World War II and, in her unpublished second novel, we see unknown stories of German scientists fleeing Nazism to Cairo. We also see how Enayat’s neglected tomb reveals the life story of her great-grandfather, Ahmed Rashid Pasha, and the disasters buried in the genealogy tree.
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On a nice fall day of 1988, Zakiya Zaghwani was found lying dead at the edge of the desert, giving way to a quest to discover the circumstances surrounding her death. While looking for whoever was involved in the death of the young singer, nearby residents discover bit by bit their involvement in many things other than the crime itself. ///The story takes place in a town near the desert. And as with Khatibi’s previous novels, this one is also marked by a tight plot, revolving around the murder of a singer who works in a hotel. This sets off a series of complex investigations that defy easy conclusions and invite doubt about the involvement of more than one character. /// Through the narrators of the novel, who also happen to be its protagonists, the author delves into the history of colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence and its successors, describing the circumstances of the story whose events unfold throughout the month. As such, the characters suspected of killing the singer are not only accused of a criminal offense, but are also concerned, as it appears, with the great legacy that the War of Independence left, from different aspects.///The novel looks back at a critical period in the modern history of Algeria that witnessed the largest socio-political crisis following its independence in 1988. While the story avoids the immediate circumstances of the war, it rather invokes the events leading up to it and tracks its impact on the social life, while capturing the daily life of vulnerable and marginalized groups. /// Nonetheless, those residents’ vulnerability does not necessarily mean they are innocent. As it appears, they are all involved in a crime that is laden with symbolism and hints at the status of women in a society shackled by a heavy legacy of a violent, wounded masculinity. This approach to addressing social issues reflects a longing to break loose from the stereotypical discourse that sets heroism in a pre-defined mold and reduces the truth to only one of its dimensions.
In the memory of 1967 defeat, Khaled Mansour put forward along with a group of most brilliant researchers these questions in the book “Dissecting Defeat of June 1967”. Questions that explain how and why was Egypt defeated in the war of six days. Did the USA urge Israel to fight Egypt? Aligning the Arabs against Israel, but how and why? The war that began and ended in 48 hours: how did Israel took control of Sinai? Who defeated Egypt? The book rereads a critical event in the history of contemporary Egypt: the defeat of June 1967. Fifty years separate us from this defeat, but its marks are still present in all aspects of our life. Not only because it was a horrible military defeat, but also as it revealed, with its cruelty and the tremendous shock it left, the decline of a social-economic-political project launched by the authority of July 1952 more than ten years before. Along the six chapters of the book, the authors offer critical insights to the roots and results of the war, as well as its relation to the structure and formation of July state, and the way the latter administrated the modernization experiment in Egypt in the years of mid twentieth century. Perhaps the implicit assumption shared by the authors of this book, different in views as they are; is that the defeat even if it was a surprise to those who lived then, was not an event without introductions. The factors that made it were eroding the body of July project along the years previous to the war. And when the war exposed the facts, the orientations changed and the project turned against itself, but the deep structures of the Nasser state did not change. They were reused for contrary purposes, so we reached the state of complete decomposition that can be seen in every site and field today. So, June 1967 still makes our present, and this present unless we practice a radical criticism; relentless towards the ghosts and nightmares of the past.
The novel takes place during the French Campaign in Egypt (1798- 1801) and the present time. It revolves around one of the young soldiers in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army known by Simon Rinar who lived in a small village in Egypt for more than ten years. Then, he escapes leaving behind a machine that no one knows anything about it. The poor villagers with their simple dreams believe that this machine could perform a miracle, if someone was able to make it work. Their dream become more intensified when the grandson of El Khwajah Rinar, Mansour, comes after many years to visit the village. Mansour comes searching for the inheritance and wanting to know the mysterious past of his grandpa, Simon Rinar, whom nothing was known about him except his extraordinary passion for magic. Mansour, who is a scientist, finds himself lost between his grandpa’s unknown past and the village’s mysterious and bloody struggles.
With this new collection, Vénus Khoury-Ghata continues and renews her poetic work. War, one of his favourite themes, is present in it in two different facets. The first part, a long poem without scansion that is not lacking in humour, focuses on daily life and characters such as Mansour the grocer or Adèle the dressmaker. The second part is animated by a more tragic breath. Vénus Khoury-Ghata delivers ample poetry of overwhelming beauty, whose images are both concrete and almost magical.
Bloodsoaked passes through unfamiliar spaces, taking its readers to the heart of Iran and the Middle East, where love and life and even death are influenced by war, religion, and, of course, a cursed history. By combining Christian aesthetics with Iranian political history and through references to the history of the Middle East in early 1980s, the author has created an atmosphere that could be attractive for both Western and Eastern audiences. Bloodsoaked is one of the most read novels in the past few months in Iran. The novel has rightly been regarded by Iranian critics as a "Modem Gothic". Mohsen Meftah, a graduate student at the University of Tehran, earns his life by following in his father's footstep and making up for the missed prayers and fasts on behalf of deceased Muslims. The story begins on an autumn day when Mohsen is scheduled to visit the graves of five brothers and perform their mother's vow. And so his life gets entangled with the story of the five brothers who grew up in an old neighborhood in Tehran, next to an Armenian Apostolic Church. With the onset of the Islamic Revolution, the lives of these brothers change forever in October 1981. Nasser, the eldest brother, goes to Isfahan with his beloved, Maryam, whose father was executed after the revolution. A Catholic collector has tempted her to excavate some sacred antiquities from a church in Isfahan in turn for a Vatican visa for herself and Nasser. But this excavation turns out to be completely different from what they have imagined. Massoud is a sniper in the Iran-Iraq War, who shoots from a church tower to prevent Iraqi forces from entering the city. He is a brave young man whose shocking destiny is tied up with the fate of the left women in a war-torn city. Mansour, the third brother, is a photographer who has taken photos from the executions and trials in Revolutionary Tribunals. Taking pictures of the execution of a notorious prostitute changes his life and drags him to Beirut. There he falls in love with a Maronite nun, Maria. But politics and religious fanaticism shape a different destiny for them. Mahmoud falls in love with a communist girl and follows her to Mashhad, so that they can flee to the Soviet Union together. And the fate of Tahir, their six-year-old brother, is tied to Tehran and St. Marry Church in their neighborhood. Mohsen says prayers over all these graves, but why they all have remained empty after so many years?
A bold narration of a secret life in a woman’s head I’M PROBABLY LOST takes place in Tehran. It narrates a day of a middle-class woman’s life. She drives aimlessly in the streets playing with the idea of cheating on her husband. As she wanders in the city, she delves into her childhood and its odd happenings. She reviews her rough adolescence and also her platonic love for a man. And above all, she thinks of Gandom; an old friend who always seemed to be the opposite of her in terms of boldness, liveliness, and freedom of spirit, yet very much like her. The woman is now married and has a child. She is going through a great deal of emotional strain due to the abundance of memories and dilemmas. She lost touch with Gandom a long time ago and now on the verge of a rebellion begins to look for her. On the one hand, she wishes to be with another man; a man who was in love with Gandom years ago and probably has news of her now. On the other hand, norms, ethics, and even her child are giving her cold feet. What will be her decision? Where’s Gandom now and what has become of her?
