Olivier Roy is one of the world's leading experts on political Islam. But he is not only a scholar—he is also a traveler. Roy's keen and iconoclastic insights emerge from a lifetime of study combined with intrepid exploration through Afghanistan and Central Asia. In this book-length interview, Roy tells the lively and colorful story of his many adventures and discoveries in a variety of social and political settings and how they have come to shape his understanding of the Islamic world and its complex recent history. In Search of the Lost Orient is a candid, personal account of the experiences that led Roy to challenge his youthful ideas of an untouched, romanticized East and build a new intellectual framework to better understand and cohabit with the religions, politics, and cultures of the East, West, North, and South. In conversation with Jean-Louis Schlegel of the French magazine Esprit, Roy offers insight into the key themes of his career. Roy's immersion in the complexities of many Central Asian territories started him on his critique of the idea of an essentialized Islam. Alongside tales of backpacking from Paris to Kabul, his Afghan decade during the Soviet invasion, and official travel to post-Soviet Central Asia in the 1990s, Roy reflects on the nature of political and humanitarian engagement in this part of the world. He recounts his formative years, education, and developing political commitments and speaks to his evolving place within France's shifting intellectual and religious cultures. This book outlines Roy's lifelong practice—a combination of deliberate research goals and chance encounters—that examines Islam, immigration, and, more broadly, the future of cultures, religions, and secularism in the face of globalization. Both a significant intellectual autobiography and a compelling travelogue through some of the world's pivotal places, In Search of the Lost Orient offers a striking testimony to the many facets of an exceptional thinker.

Taking as its main subject a series of notorious forgeries by Muslim converts in sixteenth-century Granada (including an apocryphal gospel in Arabic), this book studies the emotional, cultural and religious world view of the Morisco minority and the complexity of its identity, caught between the wish to respect Arabic cultural traditions, and the pressures of evangelization and efforts at integration into “Old Christian” society. Orientalist scholarship in Early Modern Spain, in which an interest in Oriental languages, mainly Arabic, was linked to important historiographical questions, such as the uses and value of Arabic sources and the problem of the integration of al-Andalus within a providentialist history of Spain, is also addressed. The authors consider these issues not only from a local point of view, but from a wider perspective, in an attempt to understand how these matters related to more general European intellectual and religious developments.

Originally published: New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., c1935.

Spurs fan Adam Michie is fed up with the Premier League. Countless television hours are devoted to it and billions of pounds are spent on players. Ticket prices have rocketed, matches are hyped beyond reality and results are predictable. Something is missing. The soul of football has been lost. In search of the honest roots of the sport, Adam adopted Leyton Orient in League One. Swapping Spurs' Champions League exploits in Madrid and Milan for Orient's scraps with Brentford and Bournemouth, this is the side of football where the Premier League is a distant dream and financial solvency is an achievement to be proud of. ORIENTATION follows one ordinary football supporter trying to rediscover what it was that first made him fall in love with football.

“A gorgeously written book whose literary chops are beyond doubt. Come for the prose, and stay for the murders.” — USA Today “This is beach reading that’s as intelligent as it is absorbing.”— People A gripping novel of culture clash and murder from the acclaimed author of A Beautiful Crime and The Destroyers. As summer draws to a close, a small Long Island town is gripped by a series of mysterious deaths—and one young man, a loner taken in by a local, tries to piece together the crimes before his own time runs out. Orient is an isolated town on the north fork of Long Island, its future as a historic village newly threatened by the arrival of wealthy transplants from Manhattan—many of them artists. One late summer morning, the body of a local caretaker is found in the open water; the same day, a monstrous animal corpse is found on the beach, presumed a casualty from a nearby research lab. With rumors flying, eyes turn to Mills Chevern—a tumbleweed orphan newly arrived in town from the west with no ties and a hazy history. As the deaths continue and fear in town escalates, Mills is enlisted by Beth, an Orient native in retreat from Manhattan, to help her uncover the truth. With the clock ticking, Mills and Beth struggle to find answers, faced with a killer they may not be able to outsmart. Rich with character and incident, yet deeply suspenseful, Orient marks the emergence of a novelist of enormous talent.

In a nuanced exploration of how Western cinema has represented East Asia as a space of radical indecipherability, Homay King traces the long-standing association of the Orient with the enigmatic. The fantasy of an inscrutable East, she argues, is not merely a side note to film history, but rather a kernel of otherness that has shaped Hollywood cinema at its core. Through close readings of The Lady from Shanghai, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Lost in Translation, and other films, she develops a theory of the “Shanghai gesture,” a trope whereby orientalist curios and décor become saturated with mystery. These objects and signs come to bear the burden of explanation for riddles that escape the Western protagonist or cannot be otherwise resolved by the plot. Turning to visual texts from outside Hollywood which actively grapple with the association of the East and the unintelligible—such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo: Cina, Wim Wenders’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes, and Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain—King suggests alternatives to the paranoid logic of the Shanghai gesture. She argues for the development of a process of cultural “de-translation” aimed at both untangling the psychic enigmas prompting the initial desire to separate the familiar from the foreign, and heightening attentiveness to the internal alterities underlying Western subjectivity.