An exciting debut and a wonderful work of magical realism. Outside of time, the legendary storyteller and queen Sheherazade tells a little girl a story that has happened and is yet to happen, the rebirth of a story ancient and forgotten. Dreams of Maryam Tair: Blue Boots and Orange Blossoms brings readers to a Casablanca of myth and metaphor; curses and student revolts; and of witches, demons, djinns, and bureaucrats. Long after Biblical Adam set aside forgotten first-wife Lilith for Eve, star-crossed highborn Leila and scholar Adam catch the attention of the demons during Casablanca’s 1981 Bread Riots, and are disappeared. Months later—after centuries in the demons’ lair—Adam and Leila reunite at her parents’ once grand and now cursed house as shadows of themselves. But Leila returns from her ordeal pregnant with a special, singular child, one who draws out magical beings and has the power to change everything. A daughter she named Maryam, born with the scent of orange blossoms and a body filled with pain. Seamlessly interweaving a sprawling, multi-generational family tale with ancient creation stories, Mhani Alaoui’s cyclical half-myth half-reality story celebrates the radical power of disobedience.

Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.

An evocative novel from the award-winning author of Dreams of Maryam Tair. Aya Dane creates mixed media paintings and writes a diary in her studio above a strange, old Cambridge townhouse. There she lives alone, having left her childhood home in Tangiers. Though she has carved a name for herself in the art world, she allows herself just one close relationship, to an intimate companion named David. One day, Aya receives a letter from a powerful, enigmatic patron, an invitation to submit her ultimate work to his collection. If he deems it worthy, he promises, her art will live on forever. Aya finds herself unable to resist the mysterious invitation, and challenge. But as she begins to work on the commissioned painting, from her top-floor perch, the streets of Tangiers reappear to her. Their white-and-blue walls, purple bougainvillea, sweetness and sorrow bring back to life people and events she thought she’d left behind. Aya becomes haunted by forgotten scenes, only to discover that she herself is being painted, on a canvas from which it seems impossible to escape. Aya Dane creates mixed media paintings and writes a diary in her studio above a strange, old Cambridge townhouse. There she lives alone, having left her childhood home in Tangiers. Though she has carved a name for herself in the art world, she allows herself just one close relationship, to an intimate companion named David. One day, Aya receives a letter from a powerful, enigmatic patron, an invitation to submit her ultimate work to his collection. If he deems it worthy, he promises, her art will live on forever. Aya finds herself unable to resist the mysterious invitation, and challenge. But as she begins to work on the commissioned painting, from her top-floor perch, the streets of Tangiers reappear to her. Their white-and-blue walls, purple bougainvillea, sweetness and sorrow bring back to life people and events she thought she’d left behind. Aya becomes haunted by forgotten scenes, only to discover that she herself is being painted, on a canvas from which it seems impossible to escape.

In a country where the precarious rights of women and children can be reversed in an instant, legacies of enslavement and quiet resistance still reverberate across time. Present-day Casablanca, Morocco: Nadine Alam, a physician by training and housewife by choice, has reached her hour of reckoning. Her marriage has broken down, her teenage daughter Al has retreated into silence, and now her young housekeeper Ghalia has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. One morning, Nadine receives an envelope from an unidentified sender. Inside it is a newspaper clipping, an article about a single mother and her newborn child, a boy named Noor—typically a name given to girls, meaning light. Nadine’s country is one where single mothers and children born out of wedlock are considered pariahs, outside the protection of the law. Why would a journalist disclose the child’s name? And why was she sent this clipping? Nadine embarks on a search that takes her into a Casablanca she barely knew existed, into her own family’s history and her country’s past, in which her family is entwined. A vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a Casablanca household.

""I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative. With a magical tale-spinner's words, this world-renowned scholar, one of the most eloquent voices of feminism in the Muslim world, weaves her own memories with dreams and fantasies of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her childhood." "It is the magic of recreating a world of one's own, navigating beyond the frontiers, that Mernissi describes with great wit and color. In a book as evocative as anything found in A Thousand and One Nights, she writes of the politics of seduction and the harem as metaphor. Peopled with marvelous, wise, and funny women - all individualists - Dreams of Trespass is a provocative book whose rewards go far."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Smash Cut, Flannery, and City Poet delivers the first popular biography of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet revered by contemporary Western readers. Ecstatic love poems of Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi mystic born over eight centuries ago, are beloved by millions of readers in America as well as around the world. He has been compared to Shakespeare for his outpouring of creativity and to Saint Francis of Assisi for his spiritual wisdom. Yet his life has long remained the stuff of legend rather than intimate knowledge. In this breakthrough biography, Brad Gooch brilliantly brings to life the man and puts a face to the name Rumi, vividly coloring in his time and place—a world as rife with conflict as our own. The map of Rumi’s life stretched over 2,500 miles. Gooch traces this epic journey from Central Asia, where Rumi was born in 1207, traveling with his family, displaced by Mongol terror, to settle in Konya, Turkey. Pivotal was the disruptive appearance of Shams of Tabriz, who taught him to whirl and transformed him from a respectable Muslim preacher into a poet and mystic. Their vital connection as teacher and pupil, friend and beloved, is one of the world’s greatest spiritual love stories. When Shams disappeared, Rumi coped with the pain of separation by composing joyous poems of reunion, both human and divine. Ambitious, bold, and beautifully written, Rumi’s Secret reveals the unfolding of Rumi’s devotion to a "religion of love," remarkable in his own time and made even more relevant for the twenty-first century by this compelling account.