The book considers the persistent tendency to represent the “Middle East” as a region enclosed in less permeable boundaries. This perspective of enclosure haunts Middle Eastern Studies and is part of ongoing cultural debates on cross-border circulation, currently challenged by spectacular outbursts of violence along resurfacing lines of division. This critical study analyses selected works of four contemporary Anglophone migrant writers from the Middle East (namely, Rabih Alameddine, Diana Abu-Jaber, Laila Halaby and Elif Shafak) to demonstrate that, in spite of the forceful lines that remain after religious, ethnic and political disputes, this region does not exist as a rigidly delimited place in the writing of migrants who reclaim it back from beyond its boundaries. Rather than being a permanent location, it is constructed as a place that flows into other places and is constantly reshaped by a variety of personal stories, migrant trajectories, departures and returns.

Born and brought up in Poland bilingually in French and Polish but living for most of his professional life in England and writing in English, Joseph Conrad was, from the start, as much a European writer as he was a British one and his work – from his earliest fictions through Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Secret Agent to his later novels– has repeatedly been the focal point of discussions about key issues of the modern age. With chapters written by leading international scholars, this book provides a wide-ranging survey of the reception, translation and publication history of Conrad's works across Europe. Covering reviews and critical discussion, and with some attention to adaptations in other media, these chapters situate Conrad's works in their social and political context. The book also includes bibliographies of key translations in each of the European countries covered and a timeline of Conrad's reception throughout the continent.

This book is a literary journey through Salman Rushdie’s cross-pollinated gardens, showing that the metaphor of reading as a quest is essential to Rushdie’s writing. It invites scholars and students interested in postcolonialism, postmodernism, transculturalism and the global novel to explore the many facets of Rushdie’s novels and collections of essays. The journey starts from Rushdie’s sorcery with language, and it continues with his appraisal of Joyce’s legacy. The reader will also find an analysis of the dark season of the fatwa, as well as the lush sensuality of the body and aestheticized Eros in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. The book further explores the liquid bridges, the postmodernist twist and postcolonial satire in Rushdie’s fiction. After providing a sense of Rushdie’s novel of “disorientation” and New York, the book finishes by exploring Rushdie’s Quichotte, published in 2019, an epitome of the global novel that revisits and “translates” Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha for readers addicted to TV and the Internet.

They say there was or there wasn't in olden times a story as old as life, as young as this moment, a story that is yours and is mine. Once in a Promised Land is the story of Jassim and Salwa, who left the deserts of their native Jordan for those of Arizona, each chasing mirages of opportunity and freedom. Although the couple live far from Ground Zero, they cannot escape the dust cloud of paranoia settling over the nation. A hydrologist, Jassim believes passionately in his mission to make water accessible to all people, but his work is threatened by an FBI witch hunt for domestic terrorists. A Palestinian now twice displaced, Salwa embraces the American dream. She grapples to put down roots in an unwelcoming climate, becoming pregnant against her husband's wishes. When Jassim kills a teenage boy in a terrible accident and Salwa becomes hopelessly entangled with a shadowy young American, their tenuous lives in exile and their fragile marriage begin to unravel. Once in a Promised Land is a dramatic and achingly honest look at what it means to straddle cultures, to be viewed with suspicion, and to struggle to find safe haven.

Part Odyssey of the Persian Gulf and part 1001 Nights in Europe, this debut novel is drawn from the author's experiences as a political prisoner and years as a refugee. Our hero Rasul Hamid describes the eight different ways that he fled his home in Iraq and the eight different ways he has failed to find himself a new way home. From Iraq via Northern Africa through Europe and back again, Abbas Khider deftly blends the tragic with the comic, and the grotesque with the ordinary, in order to tell the story of suffering the real and brutal dangers of life as a refugee--and to remember the haunting faces of those who did not survive the journey. This is a stunning piece of storytelling, a novel of unusual scope that brings to life the endless cycle of illegal entry and deportation that defines life for a vulnerable population living on the margins of legitimate society. Translated by Donal McLaughlin, The Village Indian provides what every good translation should: a literary looking glass between two cultures, between two places, between East and West.

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels Named after the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt, red-haired Sarah Nour El-Din is "wonderful, irresistibly unique, funny, and amazing," raves Amy Tan. Determined to make of her life a work of art, she tries to tell her story, sometimes casting it as a memoir, sometimes a novel, always fascinatingly incomplete. "Alameddine's new novel unfolds like a secret... creating a tale...humorous and heartbreaking and always real" (Los Angeles Times). "[W]ith each new approach, [Sarah] sheds another layer of her pretension, revealing another truth about her humanity" (San Francisco Weekly). Raised in a hybrid family shaped by divorce and remarriage, and by Beirut in wartime, Sarah finds a fragile peace in self-imposed exile in the United States. Her extraordinary dignity is supported by a best friend, a grown-up son, occasional sensual pleasures, and her determination to tell her own story. "Like her narrative, [Sarah's] life is broken and fragmented. [But] the bright, strange, often startling pieces...are moving and memorable" (Boston Globe). Reading group guide included.

Mobility has become one of the most exciting factors shaping our transnational and transcultural world today. However, the variety of approaches and stimulating debates it has engendered in geopolitics and sociology make it challenging for literary and cultural critics to establish solid approaches and own vocabularies. Through a variety of case studies written by international contributors, this volume addresses emerging topics by using the tools of border studies, postcolonial discourse, and globalization theory. The multiple perspectives provided here emphasize the interaction between migrants and hosts as material, discursive, and historical. The chapters in this volume view identities as mobile and in constant flux, constructed and reconstructed repeatedly in historical and cultural encounters with several others. As a result of this dynamic, established stereotypes and images are challenged and revised in the analyses here. The book concludes that cultural identities are increasingly visible as results of large-scale global mobility. In so doing, it challenges views that address ethnicity as an unambiguous category and reveals that the making of such identities is contradictory and even conflicting.