Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. --from publisher description.

He visits a bizarre flower-show in Pyongyang, crosses confusing ethno-religious fault lines in the Balkans and Lebanon, drinks tea with friendly Yemenis near Osama bin Laden’s ancestral village, explores prehistoric caves with Tuareg tribesmen in Libya, and plays Indiana Jones among pyramids shortly after a rebel attack on Khartoum. Through long-forgotten characters, bizarre coincidences of history and personal stories of individuals he encountered, Wee Cheng turns faraway lands alive, and convinces the reader that these are more than just places in the news.

This book investigates a shared experience of time and space in the post-civil-war city of Beirut: “the suspended now”. Based on the close analysis of a large corpus of cultural objects; including visual art, literature, architecture and cinema; the book argues that last decades have witnessed a gradual shift in understanding this temporality from being a transitional phase to a more durable experience of precariousness. The theoretically rich analyses take us on a journey through Beirut’s real and imagined geographies, from garbage dumps to real estate advertisements, and from subterranean spaces to martyr’s posters. For scholars of cultural analysis, urban studies, cultural geography and critical theory, the case of post-1990 Beirut offers a fascinating case of neoliberal urban renewal, which challenges existing theories. For scholars of Lebanon and Beirut, this study complements existing work on post-civil-war Lebanese cultural production rooted in trauma studies by its focus on the city’s continual exposure to violence.

Jawdat R. Haydar (1905–2006) was a prominent Lebanese poet from Baalbek, who contributed to world literature in the English language, and was the author of several books of poetry, including Voices (1980), Echoes (1989), and Shadows (1998). In 2006, he published his last book of poems, 101 Selected Poems, at the age of 101. Haydar was the recipient of several awards, including the Lebanese Order of the Cedars, the Gold Medal of Lebanese Merit, the Croix de Grand Officier of France, and a papal medal from Pope John XXIII for his humanitarian work. This edited volume of the proceedings of the first Jawdat Haydar international conference held at the Lebanese American University on April 24 2013 comprises scholarly papers on the English-language poems of the Lebanese poet. It will appeal to both an academic and non-academic readership interested in the field of 20th century English-language world literature. It will also be of use to those specialising in the comparative literature of the Middle East and the literary history of Anglo-Arabic influences in terms of the English poetical movements of Romanticism and Modernism and their reception in the Anglophone literary circles of the Arab world. Also included is a valuable appendix of digitised images containing a selection of Jawdat Haydar’s handwritten poems from the collection of archived papers held at the Jawdat R. Haydar Memorial Study Room in the Riyad Nassar Library at the Lebanese American University, Beirut. Valuable for scholars and of interest to the general reader alike, it is the first time digitised images of Haydar’s handwritten poems have ever been published.

For fans of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country's growing hostility towards the West. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.

This is a true and harrowing story of survival in the face of mindless, almost casual brutality, betrayal, cultural and religious hypocrisy. This story is told by two people from different cultures-one from the East and one from the West. Looking beyond the pain of their lives; these two people transcend cultural nuances that mask the common denominators of humanity. Denny is English, Christian, an ex-entertainer and singer. He was blinded by a mugger in London in 1991. Ali is originally from Lebanon, Muslim, and a successful industrial chemist with a pharmaceutical company in Geneva. They have discovered, since they met, some of the most remarkable parallels in their lives, including many dark secrets. Coming to terms with their pasts has provided the opportunity to explore apparent differences. In addition, these so-called unbridgeable chasms turn out to be little more than surface noise disguising deep common themes, and this is one of the major revelations of this book.