Description
Galleys available upon request Print campaign: LA Times, NY Times, Harper's, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Believer, Bomb, Bookforum, In These Times, Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, SF Chronicle, Guardian UK, Toronto Globe & Mail, Miami Herald, Poets & Writers, NY Review of Books, New Yorker, Rain Taxi, Bloomsbury Review, , Wall St Journal, Washington Post, World Literature Today, among other publications focused on world literature, contemporary fiction, and Middle East politics. We'll send to the trades: PW, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist. Pursue Excerpts and/or Reviews in: Literary translation journals such as: eXchanges Journal of Literary Translation (University of Iowa), TWO LINES, Metamorphoses (Smith College), Circumference (Columbia University), Conjunctions (Bard College), Massachusetts Review, Banipal, and others. Online/social media campaign: Words Without Borders, Conversational Reading, Three Percent (University of Rochester), The Rumpus, World Literature Today, Bookslut, Salonica World Lit, Complete Review, Molussus, Awl, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Wikipedia Radio: PRI's "The World" Endorsements: Seeking from Elias Khoury, Sinan Antoon, Juan Goytisolo, Rabih Alameddine, Roger Allen, Max Weiss, Michelle Hartman
About the Author
Hassan Daoud was born in the village of Noumairieh in southern Lebanon in 1950 and moved as a child to Beirut, though like so many Lebanese families, his retained strong links to the village and returned there every summer. Daoud studied Arabic literature at university and worked as a reporter throughout Lebanon's civil war. He is the editor of the 'Nawafidh' cultural supplement of the Beirut daily al-Mustaqbal and the author of two volumes of short stories and eight novels, four of which have already appeared in English translation. He is widely respected throughout the Arab world, and his work 180 Sunsets was longlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize. Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also Joint Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW). Her recent and forthcoming scholarly books are (as editor) Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010) and Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Women's History through Biography in Fin-de-Siecle Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). She has translated over a dozen works of Arabic fiction and memoir, including Elias Khoury's As Though She Were Sleeping (Archipelago, 2011). In addition to having won prizes for her translation she has been a judge for the University of Arkansas Press Arabic Translation Prize and the Saif al-Ghobashi-Banipal Prize. She considers herself a 'translation activist', mentoring and training emerging literary translators, organising internships for them (through CASAW) and participating in studies and events on literary translation from and into Arabic.
Reviews
"Booth's translation expands the limits of the English language and lets it be influenced by Arabic, matching the original like 'fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together' to use Benjamin's terms again. These moments of symbiosis transpire when the connotation of an expression is translated into English. Such is the case with proverbs, as when the mother declares, 'We eat our own flesh if no pennies come afresh.'"--Ghada Mourad, Reading in Translation "Editor of the Nawafidh cultural supplement of the Beirut daily al-Mustaqbal, Daoud has written two volumes of short stories and eight novels, four already translated into English (e.g., Borrowed Time). In this 1998 title, a deformed young man called the Penguin lives with his ts in the hills, where much of the populace has fled owing to destruction caused by the civil war. Bravely affecting."--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "Nothing about reading Hassan Daoud's novels is easy, but the effort is always rewarded. The complex but mundane beauty of his prose is skillfully rendered in Marilyn Booth's translation, The Penguin's Song, a novel as much about the dreary loneliness of daily life as it is about the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Slowly paced, heavy with the burden of waiting, Daoud's text unfolds painstakingly, page after page. The horror of war, the pain of isolation, the longing of unfulfilled desire, and the power of the printed word all shine through in this finely-crafted narrative."--Michelle Hartman, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University
Book Information
ISBN 9780872866232
Author Hassan Daoud
Format Paperback
Page Count 184
Imprint City Lights Books
Publisher City Lights Books
Weight(grams) 255g