Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature
10 best books like Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Robert Irwin): The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, The Full 3000-Year Tradition, One Hundred Leaves: A new annotated translation of the Hyakunin Isshu, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, Revised Edition, with a New Preface, Poets in a Landscape, The Loom of Time: A Selection of His Plays and Poems, Poems of Arab Andalusia, Moorish Spain, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, The Caliph's Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad
| Author | Tony Barnstone |
| ISBN | 0385721986 |
Unmatched in scope and literary quality, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry spans three thousand years, bringing together more than six hundred poems by more than one hundred thirty poets, in translations–many new and exclusive to the book–by an array of distinguished translators.
Here...
The Hyakunin Isshu is a poetry anthology beloved by generations of Japanese since it was compiled in the 13th century. Many Japanese know the poems by heart as a result of playing the popular card game version of the anthology. Collecting one poem each from one hundred poets living from the 7th century...
| Author | Ross E. Dunn |
| ISBN | 0520243854 |
When I met Professor Dunn, he was already being called America's foremost authority on Ibn Battuta. As we discussed our mutually favored subject, I will never forget how he commented, "I believe I can say that I know just how a Maliki scholar in the 14th century would think."
Ibn Battuta's name...
| Author | Gilbert Highet |
| ISBN | 1853753017 |
Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some...
The Loom of Time: A Selection of His Plays and Poems
| Author | Kālidāsa |
| ISBN | 0140455213 |
Kalidasa was the most accomplished poet and playwright in classical Sanskrit literature. This collection features his best-known work: the great poem Meghadutam (The Cloud Messenger), a haunting depiction of longing and separation; the play Sakuntala, which describes the troubled love between...
| Author | Cola Franzen |
| ISBN | 0872862429 |
These poems, from the astonishing 10th- through 13th-century civilization in Andalusia, are based on the codex of Ibn Sa'id, who wanted poems "whose idea is more subtle than the West Wind, and whose language is more beautiful than a fair face." Spanish readers have long been enchanted by their enduring...
| Author | Richard Fletcher |
| ISBN | 0520248406 |
Beginning in the year 711 and continuing for nearly a thousand years, the Islamic presence survived in Spain, at times flourishing, and at other times dwindling into warring fiefdoms. But the culture and science thereby brought to Spain, including long-buried knowledge from Greece, largely forgotten...
| Author | Ahdaf Soueif |
| ISBN | 1400096634 |
From the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist The Map of Love–an incisive collection of essays on Arab identity, art, and politics that seeks to locate the mezzaterra, or common ground, in an increasingly globalized world.
The twenty-five years’ worth of criticism and commentary...
| Author | Michael A. Sells |
| ISBN | 1883991692 |
Approaching the Qur’án is a major event in religious publishing. Professor Michael Sells has captured the complexity, power, and poetry of the early suras of the Qur’án, the sacred scripture of Islam. In this second edition, Sells introduces important new translations of suras and a new preface...
The Caliph's Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad
| Author | Benson Bobrick |
| ISBN | 1416567623 |
The story of Harun al-Rashid, the celebrated caliph from The Thousand and One Nights, who ruled the Islamic world when its power was at a peak in the late eighth and early ninth centuries and when the Arab world influenced Western Christian culture.
The Caliph’s Splendor is a revelation:...
| Author | Samuel Henry Hooke |
| ISBN | 0486435512 |
The role of mythology in ritual and its place in the origins of customs, cults, and hero worship are the fascinating subjects of this comparative survey. Based on firsthand sources, it recounts legends of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Canaanites, in addition to discussing...
| Author | Reza Aslan |
| ISBN | 0393065855 |
The countries that stretch along the broad horizons of the Middle East—from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Pakistan—boast different cultures, different languages, and different religions. Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and...
| Author | Stephen O'Shea |
| ISBN | 0802714986 |
The long, shared history of Christianity and Islam began, shortly after Islam emerged in the early seventh century A.D., with a question: Who would inherit the Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean? Sprung from the same source--Abraham and the Revelation given to the Jews--the two faiths played...
When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty
| Author | Hugh Kennedy |
| ISBN | 0306814803 |
The "golden age of Islam" in the eighth and ninth centuries was as significant to world history as the Roman Empire was in the first and second centuries. The rule of Baghdad's Abbasid Dynasty stretched from Tunisia to India, and its legacy influenced politics and society for years to come. In this deftly...
The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse
| Author | Anthony Thwaite |
| ISBN | 0141190949 |
Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic...
Breathtaking short stories. The stories generally start off realistic and then pivot into the mythic. The effect is startling.
He portrays experiences that are clearly universal along with many that are distinctive to Arab culture and many that are part of his mythic/surrealist aesthetic....
| Author | Mark LeVine |
| ISBN | 0307353397 |
“We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal.”
—Reda Zine, one of the founders of the Moroccan heavy-metal scene
“Music is the weapon of the future.”
—Fela Kuti
An eighteen-year-old Moroccan who loves Black Sabbath. A twenty-two-year-old rapper...
The Arabian Nights II: Sindbad and Other Popular Stories
| Author | Anonymous |
| ISBN | 0393315177 |
From the critically acclaimed translator of The Arabian Nights comes a volume of the four most popular later stories: "Sindbad the Sailor", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "Ala al-Din (Aladdin) and the Magic Lamp," and "Qamar al-Zaman." Readers will discover in each a world of high flamboyance and...
The romance of the Haft Paykar ("Seven Beauties") is one of the great works of Persian literature. Completed in 1197 by the poet Nizami of Ganja, it is an allegorical romance of great beauty and depth, and its central theme of self-knowledge as the path to human perfection is conveyed in rich and vivid...
| Author | Nizar Qabbani |
| ISBN | 1566561868 |
On Entering the Sea, Nizar Qabbani
The best love poets of the world, Qabbani has asserted life and joy in the face of chaos and tragedy, paying fervent homage, sustained over five decades, to woman's grace and loveliness. As such he has been able to bring equilibrium and decorum to poetry in crisis,...
| Author | Mahmoud Darwish |
| ISBN | 0520237544 |
Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity: at once critically acclaimed as one of the most important poets in the Arabic language, and beloved as the voice of his people. He is a living legend whose lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world's oldest literary...
| Author | Roy Mottahedeh |
| ISBN | 1851682341 |
This is a breathtaking intellectual history of Iran, starting from its pre-Islamic history all the way up the present day, and narrated alongside the story of one man in particular: a mullah trained in modern Iran's Shia seminaries. The scope of the book is really incredible and it would difficult to...
The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
In the acclaimed first volume of his history of the world's most popular literary form, Steven Moore unearthed and told the stories of remarkable works of fiction that have been neglected in conventional histories of the novel. The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 picks up the story, beginning...
| Author | Ōtomo no Yakamochi |
| ISBN | 0486439593 |
Dating from the 8th century and earlier, the Manyoshu is the oldest Japanese poetry anthology; it is also widely considered to be the best. The 1,000 poems (out of a total of more than 4,500) in this famous selection were chosen by a distinguished scholarly committee based on their poetic excellence,...
