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Come, Take a Gentle Stab features selections from his most acclaimed works of poetry, including excerpts from his book-length poems, rendered into an English that captures the exultation of language for which he is famous.     A Kurdish-Syrian man, Barakat chose to write in Arabic, the language of cultural and political hegemony that has marginalized his people. Like Paul Celan, he mastered the language of the oppressor to such an extent that the course of the language itself has been compelled to bend to his will. Barakat pushes Arabic to a point just beyond its linguistic limits, stretching those limits. He resists coherence, but never destroys it, pulling back before the final blow. What results is a figurative abstraction of struggle, as alive as the struggle itself. 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Through the return of a middle-aged man to the site of an ancient monastery in the hills near Jericho that he once visited as a boy, the incredibly vivid and surprising stories of Hind, a stage actress and brilliant storyteller, the stories of tortuous routes of checkpoints and bureaucratic blockages, and decades of Occupation, Zaqtan creates a narrative of personal reckoning and reflection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The vectors of memory and historical reflection interweave in this dreamlike narrative, which delivers a singularly powerful depiction of subjective and collective experience in the face of devastating and sweeping historical change.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49748800995601,"sku":"NGR9781803092348","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50898772558097,"sku":"GOR014113414","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51051420483857,"sku":"NIN9781803092348","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52891057750289,"sku":"CIN1803092343LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803092343.jpg?v=1751453854"},{"product_id":"1970-the-last-days-book-sonallah-ibrahim-9781803092485","title":"1970  The Last Days","description":"\u003cb\u003eA riveting novel that is both an indictment and an elegy, a second-person memoir of Nasser’s final months in the voice of his former prisoner. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In 1959, at the age of twenty-two, Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim was imprisoned by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime. Over the following five years in prison in Egypt’s Western Desert, Ibrahim kept diaries that he smuggled out on cigarette papers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In this novel, Ibrahim takes up Nasser as a fictional character tied tightly to real events, offering a window into his daily life in his final years. Ibrahim follows Nasser during the War of Attrition and the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel and looks back on the events of the previous decades. He also chronicles Nasser at his most vulnerable, detailing a more private set of Nasser’s setbacks and defeats: the daily routines of a diabetic suffering from heart trouble in the months before his death. 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Translated with great sensitivity by his son, Áthar Barghouthi, this deeply personal narrative unfurls as a stream-of-consciousness odyssey, blurring the lines between reality and dream. Haunted by a pervasive sense of loss, the prose, rich with poetic imagery, explores themes of displacement, identity, and the enduring shadows of a contested homeland.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Third Bank of the Jordan River\u003c\/i\u003e is a powerful, meditative work that defies conventional boundaries. 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