Standing at the critical juncture between traditional romance and early novelistic realism, Zayde is both the swan song of a literary tradition nearly two thousand years old and a harbinger of the modern psychological novel. Zayde unfolds during the long medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Iberian Peninsula; Madame de Lafayette (1634-93) takes the reader on a Mediterranean tour typical of classical and seventeenth-century romances—from Catalonia to Cyprus and back again—with battles, prophecies, and shipwrecks dotting the crisscrossed paths of the book’s noble lovers. But where romance was long and episodic, Zayde possesses a magisterial architecture of suspense. Chaste and faithful heroines and heroes are replaced here by characters who are consumed by jealousy and unable to love happily. And, unlike in traditional romance, the reader is no longer simply expected to admire deeds of bravery and virtue, but instead is caught up in intense first-person testimony on the psychology of desire. Unavailable in English for more than two centuries, Zayde reemerges here in Nicholas Paige’s accessible and vibrant translation as a worthy representative of a once popular genre and will be welcomed by readers of French literature and students of the European novelistic tradition.

Spending time with Grandpa is always fun. Singling, laughing, eating, and playing. And when it's time to say goodbye, It won't be for long because He's never too far away to have tea. In this sweetly simple, rhyming picture book by acclaimed author/artist Barney Saltzberg, a little girl tells us about her daily tea ritual with her grandfather where they sing and laugh and clink their teacups with the help of their computers and a video chat. A Neal Porter Book

Mapping the Middle East explores the many ways people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus River Valleys over the past millennium. By analyzing maps produced from the eleventh century on, Zayde Antrim emphasizes the deep roots of mapping in a region too often considered unexamined and unchanging before the modern period. As Antrim argues, better-known maps from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a period coinciding with European colonialism and the rise of the nation-state—not only obscure this rich past, but also constrain visions for the region’s future. Organized chronologically, Mapping the Middle East addresses the medieval “Realm of Islam;” the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire; French and British colonialism through World War I; nationalism in modern Turkey, Iran, and Israel/Palestine; and alternative geographies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Vivid color illustrations throughout allow readers to compare the maps themselves with Antrim’s analysis. Much more than a conventional history of cartography, Mapping the Middle East is an incisive critique of the changing relationship between maps and belonging in a dynamic world region over the past thousand years.

Tender Geographies

Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land in formal texts from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. These texts reveal that territories were imagined specifically as homes, cities, and regions and acted as powerful categories of belonging in the early Islamic world.

At once political institution, lived experience, and discursive figure, exile defined Louis XIV's absolutist France. The Place of Exile connects the movements of both people and books through and around this absolutist territory in order to understand the deliberate construction of real and imagined marginal cultures. Four case studies of everyday, sociable writing called leisure literature guide us through an ever-widening territory of disaffection and alienation, from the center of absolutism at Louis XIV's first court to Europe's international communities of refugees.