Includes: Along For the Ride: Kerrie and Karl both race for the same cab and agree to share. Their subconscious selves ride along, so the audience hears what they say to each other and what they are actually thinking throughout this charming comedy about love at first sight that just takes a while to blossom. ** A Low-Lying Fog:Brotherly love is put to the test as Phil and Greg try to determine what really happened on a day that forever changed their lives. This story of awful mistakes made by good people ¿ and the love that redeems such errors ¿ unfolds as the two men directly address the audience.**Blueberry Waltz:One week after an accident in a Pennsylvania coal mine that trapped men underground, a miner's wife is afraid to move on with life even though her husband was uninjured. His playful, even silly attempts fail to alleviate her obsessive terror. When she says what she really thought during his ordeal, her honesty strengthens their relationship. As a favorite song plays on the radio, they dance and know that they can face the future. ** The Ferry: A pick-up line ("Are you from Staten Island?") turns metaphysical as a woman from Iowa tries to explain how the world works to an insulated Staten Island native. As she speaks, she reveals her prejudices while he, though limited in perception and worldliness, displays the ability to accept what he sees and meet others on equal footing. The Ferry was commissioned by a benefit for families of busboys, dishwashers and other non-salaried restaurant workers in the World Trade Center. **Leaving Tangier:Cooper, an American expatriate poet, has traveled from Tangier to a rural Southern town with the ashes of Oswin Everett Pickett, a famous writer and notorious gay figure who had been living in northern Africa. Pickett left specific instructions that there be no religious observance when his ashes were returned to America, but his great niece and the local preacher are determined to give him a ¿good Methodist funeral.¿ Pickett¿s great nephew, a young man obsessed with the notorious man¿s works, urges Cooper to tell him about his deceased relative. In return, Cooper suggests that the young man should come to Tangier with him. ** Quick and Dirty (A Subway Fantasy): This steamy and provocative wake-up call for daydreamers toys with a potential liaison on a subway platform. There¿s an attractive woman and a good-looking man. Eyes meet. The attraction is obvious, but where does fantasy end and reality begin.

Tangier, in the early 1990s: Young Moroccans gather regularly in a seafront cafe to gaze at the lights on the Spanish coast glimmering in the distance. Facing a future with few prospects in a country they feel has failed them, their disillusionment is matched only by their desire to reach this paradise - so close and yet so far, not least because of the treacherous waters separating the two countries and the frightening stories they hear of the fates of would-be illegal emigrants. A young man called Azel is intent upon leaving one way or another. At the brink of despair he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spanish gallery-owner, who promises to take him to Barcelona if Azel will become his lover. Seeing no other solution, and although he has a girlfriend to whom he is promised, Azel agrees to Miguel's proposition and thus begins a different kind of hell for the young Moroccan - shame and self-disgust at his own helplessness gradually overcome him and he finds himself once more in a hopeless situation. Azel and others like him, including his sister, begin to wonder if the reality of life in Europe will live up to their dreams.

A young woman encounters strange events in her Mexican hometown in this novel by an author who “immerses us...in her wickedly funny and imaginative world” (Latina). Leaving Tabasco tells of the coming of age of Delmira Ulloa, raised in an all-female home in Agustini, in the Mexican province of Tabasco. In Agustini it is not unusual to see your grandmother float above the bed when she sleeps, or to purchase torrential rains at a traveling fair, or to watch your family’s elderly serving woman develop stigmata, then disappear completely, to be canonized as a local saint. But as Delmira becomes a woman, she will set out on a search for her missing father, and must make a choice that could mean leaving her home forever, in a tale filled with both depth and delightful mystery that poses questions about just how real the real world is. “To flee Agustini is to leave not just a town but the viscerally primal dreamscape it represents.”— The New York Times Book Review “Vibrant...Each chapter is an adventure.”—The Boston Globe “We happily share with [Delmira] her life, including the infinitely charming town she inhabits [and] her grandmother’s fantastic imagination.”—The Washington Post Book World

“A dream of a debut, by turns troubling and glorious, angry and wise.” —Junot Diaz​ Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, the debut of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Laila Lalami, evokes the grit and enduring grace that is modern Morocco. The book begins as four Moroccans illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain.What has driven them to risk their lives? And will the rewards prove to be worth the danger? There’s Murad, a gentle, unemployed man who’s been reduced to hustling tourists around Tangier; Halima, who’s fleeing her drunken husband and the slums of Casablanca; Aziz, who must leave behind his devoted wife in hope of securing work in Spain; and Faten, a student and religious fanatic whose faith is at odds with an influential man determined to destroy her future. Sensitively written with beauty and boldness, this is a gripping book about what propels people to risk their lives in search of a better future.

This book documents and analyzes how the contemporary Mediterranean city manages and negotiates its identity as a result of recent reconfigurations in its cultural, religious, and social landscape. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 have recast difference as a central trope of identification in urban borderland settings, unleashing heated debates about cultural convergences and animating anxieties about an arguable clash of civilizations in modern cities. These emerging uncertainties have also grown stronger as the homogenizing forces of globalization unsettle essential principles of the nation-state and nationhood and render fixed perceptions of distinctive and singular people and cultures more tenuous. Recent scholarship and public discourse have accordingly framed discussions of these encounters around concerns of geo-political security and international policy. Unfortunately, framed within these terms, our understanding of how various groups within the Mediterranean metropolis deal with the intensification of difference as a lived experience has remained regrettably thin. This volume transcends this limitation and explores new, interdisciplinary research paradigms that will help us gain a comprehensive perspective on how complex macro and micro tensions, contradictions and similarities are negotiated in building urban identities in the Mediterranean basin. The contributors to this volume explore the multi-faceted nature of Mediterranean cities and engage a critical discussion of identity production and consumption in the Mediterranean basin. By spanning two centuries and examining both the Northern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean, the chapters in this book provide a broad and comprehensive investigation of the ways in which recent cultural productions have framed and re-imagined the Mediterranean city as a locus of departures, arrivals and contested belonging. By focusing on cinema, photography, new media, magazines, music and literature as different stages for the performative representation of Mediterraneity, the authors highlight the vibrancy of the intercultural discourses taking place along the shores of the mare nostrum and provide new perspectives from which to explore the relationship between North and South, East and West.