A luminous, inventive, and deeply personal exploration of living in the liminal space between Jewish and Arab, ancient and modern, by a gifted Palestinian writer. Chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1988, Arabesques is a luminous novel that engages with history and politics not as propaganda but as literature. That engagement begins with the language in which the book is written: Anton Shammas, from a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Israel, wrote in Hebrew, as no Arab novelist had before. The choice was provocative to both Arab and Jewish readers. Arabesques is divided into two sections: “The Tale” and “The Teller.” “The Tale” tells of several generations of family life in a rural village, of the interplay of past and present, of how memory intersects with history in a part of the world where different people have both lived together and struggled against each other for centuries. “The Teller” is about the writer’s voyage out of that world to Paris and the United States, as he comes into his vocation as a writer, and raises questions about the authority of the storyteller and the nature of the self. Shammas’s tour de force is both a personal and a political narrative—a reinvention of the novel as a way of envisioning and responding to historical and cultural legacies and conflicts.

Much-loved author and James Beard nominee Reem Kassis presents an acclaimed and unique collection of original contemporary recipes tracing the rich history of Arab cuisine.

These meditations inspired by a Matisse painting are “a paean to the act of seeing, celebrating our capacity to be transformed by the truths art holds.” —The New York Times Book Review Named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Nonfiction of the Year Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a Moroccan screen behind her. In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of this lounging woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the rush of the modern era. Hampl’s meditation takes us to the Cote d’Azur and to North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Returning always to Matisse’s portraits of languid women, she discovers they were not decorative indulgences but something much more. Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is Hampl’s dazzling and critically acclaimed tour de force.

The Arabesque from Kant to Comics tracks the life and afterlife of the arabesque in its surprising transformation from an iconoclastic literary theory of early German Romanticism to aesthetic experimentation in both avant-garde art and popular culture. Its explosive growth in popularity was followed by an inevitable taming as arabesques became staples in book illustration, poetry publications, and even the decoration of printed scores. The subversive potential of the arabesque was preserved in one of its most surprising offspring, the comic strip: born at the moment when the cholera pandemic first swept through Europe, the comic translated the arabesque’s rank growth into unnerving lawlessness and sequences of contagious visual slapstick. Focusing roughly on the period between 1780 and 1880, this book illuminates the intersecting histories of avant-garde theories of writing, visual culture, and even the disciplinary origins of art history. In the process, it explores media history and intermediality, social networks and cultural transfer, as well as the rise of new and nontraditional art forms. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of art history, intellectual history, European art, aesthetics, book illustration, material culture, reproduction, comics, and German history.

The first biography of Claude Bragdon, an early and unique, but often overlooked, advocate of architectural modernism.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series American Arabesque examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, Berman contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.

Featuring multidisciplinary research by an international team of leading scholars, this volume addresses the contested aspects of arabesque while exploring its penchant for crossing artistic and cultural boundaries to create new forms. Enthusiastically imported from its Near Eastern sources by European artists, the freely flowing line known as arabesque is a recognizable motif across the arts of painting, music, dance, and literature. From the German Romantics to the Art Nouveau artists, and from Debussy’s compositions to the serpentine choreographies of Loïe Fuller, the chapters in this volume bring together cross-disciplinary perspectives to understand the arabesque across both art historical and musicological discourses.