The Butterfly's Burden


Book Description

Newest work from Mahmoud Darwish--the most acclaimed poet in the Arab world




The Diving Bell and the Butterfly


Book Description

A triumphant memoir by the former editor-in-chief of French Elle that reveals an indomitable spirit and celebrates the liberating power of consciousness. In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor-in-chief of French Elle, the father of two young children, a 44-year-old man known and loved for his wit, his style, and his impassioned approach to life. By the end of the year he was also the victim of a rare kind of stroke to the brainstem. After 20 days in a coma, Bauby awoke into a body which had all but stopped working: only his left eye functioned, allowing him to see and, by blinking it, to make clear that his mind was unimpaired. Almost miraculously, he was soon able to express himself in the richest detail: dictating a word at a time, blinking to select each letter as the alphabet was recited to him slowly, over and over again. In the same way, he was able eventually to compose this extraordinary book. By turns wistful, mischievous, angry, and witty, Bauby bears witness to his determination to live as fully in his mind as he had been able to do in his body. He explains the joy, and deep sadness, of seeing his children and of hearing his aged father's voice on the phone. In magical sequences, he imagines traveling to other places and times and of lying next to the woman he loves. Fed only intravenously, he imagines preparing and tasting the full flavor of delectable dishes. Again and again he returns to an "inexhaustible reservoir of sensations," keeping in touch with himself and the life around him. Jean-Dominique Bauby died two days after the French publication of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This book is a lasting testament to his life.




In the Time of the Butterflies


Book Description

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times) Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now! It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression. "Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review "This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." —Popsugar.com "A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." —People "Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." —Los Angeles Times "A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time.” —St. Petersburg Times "Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."—Cosmopolitan.com




Tethered to Stars


Book Description

A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams. Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.” Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.




State of Siege


Book Description

Mahmoud Darwish (1942–2008), recipient of France’s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal, the Lotus Prize, and the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom, is widely considered Palestine’s most eminent poet. State of Siege was written while the poet himself was under siege in Ramallah during the Israeli invasion of 2002. An eloquent and impassioned response to political extremity, the collection was published to great acclaim in the Arab world. Munir Akash’s translation, including an introduction exploring the rich mythology of these poems, presents the first book-length, bilingual edition of State of Siege to an English audience.




If I Were Another


Book Description

Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Translation: A collection of the Palestinian poet’s work spanning his career from 1990 to 2005. Mahmoud Darwish was that rare literary phenomenon: a poet both acclaimed by critics as one of the most important poets in the Arab world and beloved by his readers. His language—lyrical and tender—helped to transform modern Arabic poetry into a living metaphor for the universal experiences of exile, loss, and identity. The poems in this collection, constructed from the cadence and imagery of the Palestinian struggle, shift between the most intimate individual experience and the burdens of history and collective memory. Brilliantly translated by Fady Joudah, If I Were Another—which collects the greatest epic works of Darwish’s mature years—is a powerful yet elegant work by a master poet that demonstrates why Darwish was one of the most celebrated poets of his time and was hailed as the voice and conscience of an entire people. “[Darwish] writes poetry of the highest and most intense quality—poetry that embodies epic and lyric both, deeply symbolic, intensely emotional . . . He has, in Joudah’s startling and tensile English, expended into us a new vastness.” —Kazim Ali, The Kenyon Review “Here we have in one glorious volume the reach and the depth of Darwish’s lyric epics that individually, repeatedly, and cumulatively shifted our understanding of what poetry can accomplish. In his lucid and compelling translations, Joudah offers us a gesture of unequaled fraternity in lines that mirror and move in loyalty to the birth of new poems.” —Breyten Breytenbach, author of All One Horse




Mural


Book Description

"The most celebrated writer of verse in the Arab world." –Adam Shatz, The New York Times Poetry from former national poet of Palestine, illustrated by original drawings by John Berger Mahmoud Darwish was the Palestinian national poet. One of the greatest poets of the last half century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession and exile. His poems display a brilliant acuity, a passion for and openness to the world and, above all, a deep and abiding humanity. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works. Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger, Mural is a testimony to one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.




Where Butterflies Go


Book Description

IndieReader Discovery Award Winner for Best Historical Fiction IAN Book of the Year Awards Finalist for Outstanding Historical Fiction Meira Sokolow had the misfortune of being born to Jewish parents in Warsaw, Poland, in 1912. Before she took her first breath, her fate had been sealed. Residing in the Jewish Quarter of the city, Meira’s early life was typical. She fell in love with a local boy, got married, and had a daughter. Then the German army marched into Warsaw and everything changed. Forced into the ghetto with her family, she found survival to be a daily struggle. Hunger, disease, and unimaginable cruelty were her stark realities. When the ghetto was purged and she was sent to a concentration camp, Meira still had her family, and that was all that mattered. Then the camp was liquidated, and only a handful of survivors remained out of thousands. Meira Sokolow was one of them. No longer a wife or mother, Meira emigrated to New York City. After World War II, the world wanted to move on and start a new chapter, but Meira couldn’t turn the page so easily. She walked through her days alone, like a ghost with nothing to tether her to the earth. Then she met Max, a handsome American, who first mistook her for one of the boring socialites he encountered every day. He soon learned she was unlike anyone he had met before, seeing her strength and resilience, even when she couldn’t. Max knew he could breathe life into her again, if only she would let him. Where Butterflies Go is based on the harrowing true story of one woman’s survival during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and her struggle to find meaning in the aftermath.




Of Moths an Butterflies


Book Description

Archer Hamilton is a collector of rare and beautiful insects. Gina Shaw is a servant in his uncle's house. Clearly out of place in the position in which she has been discovered, she becomes a source of fascination . . . and curiosity. A girl with a blighted past and a fortune she deems a curse, Gina has lowered herself in order to find escape from her family and their scheming designs. But when she is found, the stakes suddenly become dire. All Gina wants is the freedom to live her life as she would wish. All her aunts want is the money that comes with her. But there is more than one way to trap an insect. An arranged marriage might turn out profitable for more parties than one. Mr. Hamilton is about to make the acquisition of a lifetime. But will the price be worth it? Can a woman captured and acquired learn to love the man who has bought her?




RIVER DIES OF THIRST


Book Description