War and poetry, The work of Thich Nhat Hanh, by Hoa Pham

Last night at the Community for Mindful Living sangha in Hanoi we practiced “Touching the Earth”. This practice involves acknowledging the contribution of your ancestors and spiritual masters in your being and then extending love and compassion to those whom have made you suffer. The practice was devised by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master living in exile in France.

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The History of The Veil, by Ali Alizadeh

Once upon a time: Bedouin shepherd marries into early-
Medieval mercantile city-dwellers of Arabia. Freed from the bondage of work, he lazes in caves, imagines
god. His urbane wife, connoisseur of comfortable life hates deserts, caravans and camels; the first convert
to his way of imagining god. But how to exalt, distinguish

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Occupation and the City: a Reading in Sahar Khalifeh’s the Sunflower, by Wisam Mansour

Sahar Khalifeh, a Palestinian academician and novelist, explores in her narratives, among other things, the impact of occupation on the day-to-day life of Palestinians in their cities and villages. In her 1980 Sunflower, Khalifeh vividly portrays the city of Nablus from the viewpoints of several male and female characters who see the city and themselves under occupation from the perspectives of class, gender, ethnicity and situatedness. Cut off from the outside by military occupation, cordoned by hostile settlements, and impaired sexually and emotionally, the city and its inhabitants in Khalifeh’s narrative suffer from excessive atrophy.

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The Essential Wayne Booth. Edited by Walter Jost

Wayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time, most notably the 1961 classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, a book that transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for advanced discussions of how fiction works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers re-create texts. While Booth’s work was formative to the study of literature, his essential writings have never been collected in a single volume—until now. Selected by Walter Jost in collaboration with Booth himself, the texts anthologized here present a picture of this indispensable critic’s contributions to literary and rhetorical studies. The selections range from memorable readings of Macbeth, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James to engagements with Booth’s intellectual heroes, such as Richard McKeon and Mikhail Bakhtin. But rhetoric, Booth’s abiding concern as a critic and thinker, provides the organizing principle of the anthology.

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