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English edition
Sep
2010
256 pp.
Hardbound
15X23 cm
$19.95
LE 80.00
ISBN
978 977 416 418 7
For sale only in the Middle East
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Specters
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Radwa Ashour
Translated by
Barbara Romaine
By the author of Granada
Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their days at work, their married and unmarried lives, and the two books they are writing, both called Specters. This lively metafictional novel is a mix of genres: part autobiography, part oral history, part documentary, part fiction. As the narrative moves back and forth between Radwa’s novel Specters and Shagar’s history Specters (about the massacre at Deir Yassin, a Palestinian Arab village near Jerusalem, in April 1948), Ashour unites the projects of history and literature and blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political in one compellingly readable meditation on contemporary life in a fractured world.
Winner of the Cairo International Book Fair Prize
Radwa Ashour, a highly acclaimed Egyptian writer and scholar, is the author of more than fifteen books of fiction, memoir, and criticism; among them, Siraaj and Granada have been published in English. She is a recipient of the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature.
Barbara Romaine has been teaching Arabic for nearly two decades, currently at Villanova University. Her other translations include Bahaa Taher’s novel Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery and Radwa Ashour’s Siraaj. She received an NEA fellowship to support the translation of Specters.
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Reviews
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"An impressive experiment in narrative form. Ashour braids together scenes from her own autobiography with scenes from an invented life."
‹Ahdaf Soueif
“A stimulating read ... it raises difficult questions” —Al Ahram Weekly
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Also available
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Arab Women Writers
Hardbound
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Granada
Paperback
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