Scheherazade in America

By: Alia Yunis: “The Night Counter” In her novel The Night Counter, Alia Yunis tells the story of a Lebanese-American family in the USA that has cut its ties with its Arab origins. In Yunis’s book, Scheherazade, the great literary teller of tales, does not relate stories, but listens to them instead. A review by

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Controversial French Writer, Houellebecq, Wins France’s Top Literary Prize

News Agencies – November 8, 2010 The controversial bestselling author Michel Houellebecq has won France’s most coveted literary prize — the Prix Goncourt — for his new novel, La Carte et Le Territoire (“The Map and the Territory”). The novel tells of a solitary, misanthropic artist who becomes a critical darling and commercial success almost

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Muslims Meet Punk

The film, directed by Eyad Zahra, is based on a novel by Michael Muhammad Knight about a fictitious Muslim punk scene in the United States. The tale is told through the eyes of Yusef (Bobby Naderi), a preposterously naïve engineering student in Buffalo, whose family is from Pakistan. Yusef moves off campus into a squalid

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Clumsy Anti-Terror Investigation: Hilal Sezgin’s Novel about Muslims in Germany

1 October 2010 The new novel by Hilal Sezgin begins with a fictional terrorist attack on Germany – an attack that is not only deeply unsettling for the nation, but also for the book’s heroine. In a humorous and light-hearted tone, the German-Turkish writer and columnist tells of coexistence in a nervous society that suspects

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Ben Kader, a Nebulous and Painful Identity

22 August 2010 The Editions de l’Aire will soon be publishing a French translation of Zurich author Daniel Groetsch’s novel Ben Kader. The novel shifts between Algiers in 1957 and Zurich in 2001, and explores the contrasts between father and son, adopted and assumed identities, Eastern and Western cultures, Islam and Christianity. Ben Kader himself

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