Search results for ""Author Jonathan Wright""

Set in the 5th century AD, Azazeel is the exquisitely crafted tale of a Coptic monk's journey from Upper Egypt to Alexandria and then Syria during a time of massive upheaval in the early Church. Winner of the Arab Booker Prize, Azazeel highlights how the history of our civilization has been warped by greed and avarice since its very beginnings and how one man's beliefs are challenged not only by the malice of the devil, but by the corruption with the early Church. In sparse and often sparkling prose that reflects the arid beauty of the Syrian landscape, Azazeel is a novel that forces us to re-think many of our long-held beliefs and invites us to rediscover a lost history.

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From legends of the desert to horrors of the forest, Blasim's stories blend the fantastic with the everyday, the surreal with the all-too-real. Taking his cues from Kafka, his prose shines a dazzling light into the dark absurdities of Iraq's recent past and the torments of its countless refugees. The subject of this, his second collection, is primarily trauma and the curious strategies human beings adopt to process it (including, of course, fiction). The result is a masterclass in metaphor - a new kind of story-telling, forged in the crucible of war, and just as shocking.

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Meet Hatem el-Shenawi, a Muslim TV preacher who has won fame and fortune through his show delivering Islam to the masses. Affable, sharp-witted, and well-connected to the government and business elite of Cairo, Shenawi seems at the top of his game. But when he is entrusted with a dangerous secret, one that could tip the whole country into chaos, the double-edged sword of his celebrity threatens him with scandal and ruin as he is drawn deeper into political intrigue and the dark underbelly of the state. Fast-paced and brilliantly observed, The Televangelist takes us on a journey into the corrupt nexus of power, money, media, and religious performance that has dominated Egypt in recent years.

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WINNER OF THE NAGUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATUREA BEST NEW BOOK OF 2023 (THE NEW ARAB)A “spare, well-crafted and compelling” (Samah Selim) novel in which a man in Algiers disappears without trace and the detective in search of him finds more than he expectedIn Rouiba, a nondescript suburb of Algiers, an unnamed man with a troubled past escapes his everyday life to find himself caring for an old man with dementia. When the man dies, the carer disappears into thin air. A police detective is assigned to investigate the circumstances of the old man’s demise and to track down the caretaker, only to find that the unnamed man cannot be identified—that there is no trace of Mr. Nobody. The officer’s search leads him to those whose paths once crossed Mr. Nobody’s. In each of them he finds a reflection of the man he is looking for.A raw, lyrical portrait of life on the margins in contemporary Algiers, this haunting noir captures an underworld of police informers, shady imams, bootleg beer traders, and grave robbers, and reverberates with echoes of Algeria’s violent past.

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Chess-playing people-traffickers, suicidal photographers, absurdist sound sculptors, cat-loving rebel sympathisers, murderous storytellers... The characters in Hassan Blasim’s debut novel are not the inventions of a wild imagination, but real-life refugees and people whose lives have been devastated by war. Interviewed by Hassan Owl, an aspiring Iraq-born writer, they become the subjects of an online art project, a blog that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, reportage and the novel. Framed by an email correspondence with the mysterious Alia, a translator of the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, the project leads us through the bars, brothels and bathhouses of Hassan’s past and present in a journey of trauma, violence, identity and desire. Taking its conceit from the Islamic tradition that says God has 99 names, the novel trains a kaleidoscopic lens on the multiplicity of experiences behind Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’, and asks how those who have been displaced might find themselves again.

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From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam... Blasim’s stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, as well as offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience. Blending allegory with historical realism, and subverting readers’ expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare. For all their despair and darkness, though, what lingers more than the haunting images of war, or the insanity of those who would benefit from it, is the spirit of defiance, the indefatigable courage of those few characters keeping faith with what remains of human intelligence. Together these stories represent the first major literary work about the war from an Iraqi perspective.

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Hani was out for an evening stroll near Cairo's Tahrir Square when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. An informant had identified him, and he was thrown into the back of a police truck. There began a seven-month nightmare as he was swept up, along with fifty other men, in the infamous Queen Boat affair that targeted Egypt’s gay community. Finally free, but traumatized into speechlessness, Hani writes down the events of his life—his first sexual desires, his relationship with his mother, his marriage of convenience, and his passion for Abdel Aziz, the only man he ever truly loved. In the Spider’s Room is a sensitive and courageous account of life as a gay man in Egypt.

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Everything you need to start eating clean Whether you've lived on white carbs and trans fats all your life or you're already health conscious but want to clean up your diet even further, Eating Clean For Dummies, 2nd Edition explains in plain English exactly what it means to keep a clean-eating diet. Brought to you by a respected MD and licensed nutritionist, it sets the record straight on this lifestyle choice and includes recipes, the latest superfoods, tips and strategies for navigating the grocery store, advice on dining out, and practical guidance on becoming a clean eater for life. Clean eating is not another diet fad; it's used as a way of life to improve overall health, prevent disease, increase energy, and stabilize moods. Eating Clean For Dummies shows you how to stick to foods that are free of added sugars, hydrogenated fats, trans fats, and anything else that is unnatural or unnecessary. Plus, you'll find recipes to make scrumptious clean meals and treats, like whole grain scones, baked oatmeal, roasted cauliflower, caramelized onion apple pecan stuffing, butternut mac and cheese, and more. Get the scoop on how clean eating helps you live longer, prevent disease, and lose weight Change your eating habits without sacrificing taste or breaking your budget Make more than 40 delicious clean-eating recipes Deal with food allergies and sensitivities You are what you eat! And Eating Clean For Dummies helps get you on the road to a healthier you.

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"An unflinching and deeply humane masterwork by a writer of astounding talent and courage."—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange ParadiseMysterious men are rounding up street children and enrolling them in a so-called “rehabilitation program,” designed to indoctrinate them for the military-backed regime’s imminent crackdown on its opponents. Across town, thousands of protesters encamp in a city square demanding the return of the recently deposed president.Reminiscent of recent clashes in Egypt and reflective of political movements worldwide where civilians face off against state power, Abdel Aziz deftly illustrates the universal human struggles between resisting and succumbing to an oppressive regime.Here Is A Body is a courageous and powerful depiction of the state cooptation of human bodies, the dehumanization of marginalized groups, and the use of inflammatory religious rhetoric to manipulate a narrative.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2019 A brilliant collection of fictions in the vein of Roald Dahl, Etgar Keret and Amy Hempel. These are stories of what the world looks like from a child's pure but sometimes vengeful or muddled perspective. These are stories of life in a war zone, life peppered by surreal mistakes, tragic accidents and painful encounters. These are stories of fantasist matadors, lost limbs and perplexed voyeurs. This is a collection about sex, death and the all-important skill of making life into a joke. These are unexpected stories by a very fresh voice. These stories are unforgettable.

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Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory “Formally daring, stylistically inventive, this is Antoon’s most complex work to date.” —Malcolm Forbes, The National The celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

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Punk rock culture in a preeminently average town Synonymous with American mediocrity, Peoria was fertile ground for the boredom- and anger-fueled fury of punk rock. Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett explore the do-it-yourself scene built by Peoria punks, performers, and scenesters in the 1980s and 1990s. From fanzines to indie record shops to renting the VFW hall for an all-ages show, Peoria's punk culture reflected the movement elsewhere, but the city's conservatism and industrial decline offered a richer-than-usual target environment for rebellion. Eyewitness accounts take readers into hangouts and long-lost venues, while interviews with the people who were there trace the ever-changing scene and varied fortunes of local legends like Caustic Defiance, Dollface, and Planes Mistaken for Stars. What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a youth culture in search of entertainment but just as hungry for community—the shared sense of otherness that, even for one night only, could unite outsiders and discontents under the banner of music.A raucous look at a small-city underground, Punks in Peoria takes readers off the beaten track to reveal the punk rock life as lived in Anytown, U.S.A.

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WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION A SATIRICAL REIMAGINING OF MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN SET IN MODERN-DAY BAGHDAD, BRILLIANTLY CAPTURING THE HORROR OF A CITY AT WAR From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, Hadi collects body parts from the dead, which he stitches together to form a corpse. He claims he does it to force the government to recognise the parts as real people, and give them a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps across the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking, flesh-eating monster that cannot be killed. At first it's the guilty he attacks, but soon it's anyone who crosses his path... 'A remarkable book' Observer WINNER OF THE KITSCHIES GOLDEN TENTACLE AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2019

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A lifetime ago, Fakhreddin had been an idealistic young lawyer, seeking to fight corruption from his modest quarter of Cairo. Then, a botched attempt on his life forced him to flee the country, propelling him on a wild journey that would lead to Afghanistan’s jihadi training camps. He was transformed into a trained killer, and never once lost sight of his goal: revenge. But did he lose sight of the only person that really mattered to him, his son, Omar? At the very core of Fakhreddin’s bold, nail-biting exploits are his broken family, and broken heart, and his search for redemption and a way home.

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