But what is the meaning of Mustafa's shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man--whom he has asked to look after his wife--in an unsettled and violent no-man's-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.

In stunning language, Darwish's self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people.

Through these lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, friendship, family, and the ongoing conversation between life and death, the poet bids himself and his readers a poignant farewell.

Since the discovery over one hundred years ago of a body of Mesopotamian poetry preserved on clay tablets, what has come to be known as the Epic of Gilgamesh has been considered a masterpiece of ancient literature. It recounts the deeds of a hero-king of ancient Mesopotamia, following him through adventures and encounters with men and gods alike. Yet the central concerns of the Epic lie deeper than the lively and exotic storyline: they revolve around a man's eternal struggle with the limitations of human nature, and encompass the basic human feelings of loneliness, friendship, love, loss, revenge, and the fear of the oblivion of death. These themes are developed in a distinctly Mesopotamian idiom, to be sure, but with a sensitivity and intensity that touch the modern reader across the chasm of three thousand years. This translation presents the Epic to the general reader in a clear narrative.

Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers evaluates the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US as depicted through the recurring theme of rebellious Black immigrant daughters. Considering the work of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi, Jeffers untangles how rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status. Immigrant and second-generation writers mobilize often complicated familial relationships to comment on a variety of political, social, and psychic contexts. Jeffers argues that rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, Marshall, Danticat, Adichie, and Selasi identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. By highlighting the diverse ways Black migrants and their children negotiate this position amid the dual demands of the respectability politics imposed on African Americans and the model-minority myth imposed on immigrants, Jeffers reveals the unsteady nature of US racial categories.

Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.

Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms. Lovers who don't return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound--sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous--moments of life under Israeli occupation.

Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. It matters to me, writes Abu Al-Hayyat, what you're thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling whether it's coming up with plans / to solve the world's problems, plans that eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans, or dreaming of a war / that's got no war in it, or proclaiming that I don't believe in survival.

In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority--at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.

-Long-listed for the 2024 British Science Fiction Association Award, Best Non-Fiction
-2024 Locus Recommended Reading List
-One of Brittle Paper's 100 Notable African Books of 2024
-One of Open Country Mag's 60 Notable African Books of 2024

In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.

Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa.

Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, becoming, black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more.

Contributing authors - Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen - offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms.

The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.

Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers evaluates the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US as depicted through the recurring theme of rebellious Black immigrant daughters. Considering the work of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi, Jeffers untangles how rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status. Immigrant and second-generation writers mobilize often complicated familial relationships to comment on a variety of political, social, and psychic contexts. Jeffers argues that rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, Marshall, Danticat, Adichie, and Selasi identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. By highlighting the diverse ways Black migrants and their children negotiate this position amid the dual demands of the respectability politics imposed on African Americans and the model-minority myth imposed on immigrants, Jeffers reveals the unsteady nature of US racial categories.

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework.

Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works - novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays - as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa.

The raw creativity found in Achebe's stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story - precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial - have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writer's works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.

Modern Sudanese Poetry features voices as diverse as the country's ethnic, cultural, and natural composition. By bringing these voices together, Babikir provides a glimpse of Sudan's poetry scene as well as the country's modern history and post-independence trajectory.

This book argues that literary production in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa has developed distinctive aesthetic idioms that critically respond to crises of global capitalism and related failures of post-colonial governance. Drawing from recent research at the intersection of world-systems analysis and materialist theories of world literature, it identifies and evaluates two generic trends in the post-independence literatures of Mozambique and Angola. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, there is a marked tendency in Mozambican literary production towards fictional representations of ghosts, spectral effects and gothic narrative techniques. In Angola, there is an analogous outburst of literary expression from the mid-1990s onwards, in which writers increasingly turn towards dystopian images of apocalypse, ecological crisis, and the disintegration of existing modes of social reproduction. Away from a restricted focus on the decline of the post-independence Marxist-Leninist state, the book contends that the upswing in these two genres of writing functions to critically register a world-systemic horizon that both surpasses and includes locally determined, national realities. The patterned repetition of spectral and dystopian forms in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa occurred at a time of heightened capitalisation, in which the region was subjected to newly expropriative forms of accumulation and ecological enclosure via integration into a reconstellated world-system headed by neoliberal finance capital. Through close readings of texts by authors such as Mia Couto, Suleiman Cassamo, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Pepetela, and Ondjaki, this book asks: What factors drove literary production towards the figure of the spectre in Mozambique and towards dystopia in Angola? What emerging energies and social contradictions found shape in these generic idioms in ways that existing vocabularies were unable to express? What does the geo-temporal passage from spectrality to dystopia tell us about the history of capitalist development in southern Africa, and about the restructuring of political-economic parameters across the globe?

The book analyzes four comedic archetypes: the Trickster, who is unapologetically amoral and entertaining; the Mimic, whose everyday dealings exude ambiguity; the Interpreter, who demonstrates the comic potential of language differences while showing how a single message can mean contrasting things; and the Deviant, who throws norms into question all the while reinforcing them. These character types and the humor they produce present a constant pursuit of balance between contrasting worldviews and frames of reference within the imbrication of different languages, classes, political factions, genders, and (un)officialdoms. The product of these rowdy relations are people who take the weirdness and run with it to generate diegetic and intradiegetic laughs. By analyzing Francophone and Anglophone African writing and how it overlays local languages, Opoku-Agyemang contributes a uniquely African voice to the primarily Western-dominated field of humor studies.

-Long-listed for the 2024 British Science Fiction Association Award, Best Non-Fiction
-2024 Locus Recommended Reading List
-One of Brittle Paper's 100 Notable African Books of 2024
-One of Open Country Mag's 60 Notable African Books of 2024

In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.

Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa.

Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, becoming, black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more.

Contributing authors - Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen - offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms.

The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.