By Sarah Burke

Sadder Than Water: poems by Samih al-QasimMaps

Several years ago I traveled in Tunisia with a friend. We felt pretty cool: we avoided the resorts, took local transport, ate local food, practiced our languages. One day we rolled into a town by the edge of the Sahara that is the starting point of many coordinated journeys into the desert—camels, sunset over the dunes, dinner cooked on a fire, etc. We had compared the reviews of several tour agencies in Lonely Planet and Rough Guide, volumes stored like talismans in our respective backpacks. As we emerged from the shared van into this new town, a man approached us and began talking about the agency he represented. It was the best, he said, the number one agency for trips into the desert.

By Rachel Donadio

From the war in Iraq to the rumblings in Iran to the heightening tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, there are few bright spots in the Middle East these days. But one boutique Jerusalem press has cleared a space for conversation in a contentious region. Started in 1998 by a husband-and-wife team, Ibis Editions has published English translations of works in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, German and Judeo-Spanish—all relating to the Levant.

By Crystal Allene Cook

Read about the "Art Knows No Borders" event on November 18, 2008.

Arriving in Yerevan, Armenia on a Fulbright in 2004 to research a novel, I had some specific things in mind. Once on the ground, making friends, talking to people, traveling, many of my preconceived notions of those things, and of myself, soon began to change.

By Mark LeVine

With less than a week left before the most important presidential election in at least a generation, the McCain campaign has decided that, having failed to convince most Americans that Barack Obama is actually a closet Muslim, its best hope for winning undecided voters is to accuse Obama of having Muslim friends.

Not just Muslim friends, Muslim Palestinian friends. Apparently there are few more fearful combinations in the American ethno-religious lexicon.

Reviewed by Jordan Elgrably

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East: your purchase benefits LCC programmingFor years, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians has galvanized our attention with sensational headlines and stories of bloody conflict. Frequently lost in media reporting are the human stories of individuals and families on both sides. In Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree, an intimate portrait of a Palestinian and an Israeli family emerge, both sharing a history in the same house in al-Ramla, once a town in Palestine, now an Israeli city south of Tel Aviv.

By Mehnaz M. Afridi

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma: your purchase benefits LCC programming“Well, I’ve missed my way. I turned from art to a profession, which is also dying. Law and art both belong to the past. I can’t master the new art, as you have done, and like you, I failed to study science. How can I find the lost ecstasy of creation? Life is so short and I can’t forget the vertigo caused by the fellow’s words: Don’t we live our lives knowing that our fate rests with God?”

“Does the idea of Death disturb you?”

“No, but it urges me to taste the secret of life.”

Language for a New Century: your purchase benefits LCC programmingKudos to Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. This handsome new anthology (Norton 2008) celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East—gathering an unprecedented selection of works by East Asian, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the diaspora. The volume is organized around nine themes—including childhood, politics and oppression, identity, war, homeland and love—and includes more than 400 unique voices from 59 countries. Each section of the anthology—organized by theme rather than national affiliation—is preceded by a personal essay from the editors that introduces the poetry and invokes the readers to examine their own identities in light of these powerful poems.

By Niloufar Talebi

“Theblind alleys that run alongside human conversation/like lashes are asign of God…From these diverse signs you can see/how much work remainsto do./Put away your sadness. It is a mantle of work.”

Poet/translator Niloufar Talebi They say it takes ten years to make a dancer and twenty to settle animmigrant, both of which I have been. I started to dance in mymid-twenties, and after ten years of training, having swum upstream tomake an aging instrument into an expressive one, I began to finallyacquire that coveted dancer’s “center,” though the moment I danced as atenured dancer was fleeting—as the absence of a life-long foundationcollided head-on with the tenuousness of a newly-trained body. Then,what does the aging dancer do when her physical facility wanes? Shepours herself into other bodies, redirects her ideas into movement forother bodies, translates her ideas into movements for those bodies. Inother words, she choreographs, superimposes herself on the shiftingsurface of other bodies. She re-enters the self from a differentposition, recreates herself elsewhere. This way, the dancer does notdie, but lives on by way of transforming.

“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

Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam: your purchase benefits LCC programmingMark LeVine is the author of Why They Don't Hate Us, Unveiling the Axis of Evil. In his new book, Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, you'll find an eighteen-year-old Moroccan who loves Black Sabbath. A twenty-two-year-old rapper from the Gaza Strip. A young Lebanese singer who quotes Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” They are as representative of the world of Islam today as the conservatives and extremists we see every night on the news. Heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, and reggae are each the music of protest, and in many cases considered immoral in the Muslim world. This music may also turn out to be the soundtrack of a revolution unfolding across that world.

[Los Angeles, September 22, 2008] A coalition of Los Angeles arts and peace organizations will present “The Art of Coexistence: The Lemon Tree & The Olive Grove” on Wednesday, October 15, 2008. This public program is free to the public and features Deborah Rohan, author of The Olive Grove: A Palestinian Story (Saqi 2008), and Sandy Tolan, author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury 2006) at the Beverly Hills Library Auditorium. Coincidentally, October is the month of olive harvesting for Palestinian farmers.