Authors - The List
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Authors - The List |
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The books suggested in the following represent my humble taste, they are in my opinion some of the best books written in recent times, while some deal with the human experiences others dwell on the aspect of history as it is viewed at the contextual moment. These pages will be updated on a monthly basis and will always include books from my private collection. Please send your comments to the following e-mail to: avraham@al-andaluz.com | ||||||
| 5 | Italian Folktales | 6 | The Book Of Embraces | ||||
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| Who but Italo Calvino could have selected two
hundred of Italy's traditional Folktales and retold them so wondrously? The reader is
lured into a world of clearly Italian stamp, where kings and peasants, saints and
ogres-along with an array of the most extraordinary plants and animals-disport themselves
against the rich background of regional customs and history. Whether the tone is humorous
and earthy, playful and nonsensical, or noble and mysterious, the drama unfolds strictly
according to the joyous logic of' the imagination. Chosen one of the New York Times’s ten best hooks in the year of its original publication, Italian Folktales immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In this collection Calvino combines a sensibility attuned to the fantastical with a singular writerly ability to capture the visions and dreams of a people. |
"Turn loose the voices, undream the
dream. Through my writing I try to express the magical reality, which I find at the core
of the hideous reality of America. " Eduardo Galeano's epic three-volume history of the Americas, Memory of Fire, has established him as one of the most brilliant and passionate literary voices from Latin America today. His newest work, The Book of Embraces, employs a similar vignette style of composition to more personal, but no less moving and mesmerizing ends. Here, through parable and paradox and anecdote and dream and fragments of autobiography, Galeano constructs a world view-one that will enchant readers with its passion and irony and sheer joy in existence. In the universe of The Book of Embraces, the private and the political seamlessly blend; and reality speaks in a multiplicity of voices. What emerges is a stunning brief for love, friendship, courage, perseverance, and imagination for human possibility. The Book of Embraces will capture readers in its own magical embrace and delight them. |
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| Publisher: |
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich |
Publisher: |
W. W. Norton & Company |
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| ISBN: | 0-15-645489-0 | ISBN: | 0-393-02960-3 | ||||
7 |
Sand and Foam | 8 |
The Muqaddimah | ||||
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| A book of aphorisms, poems, and parables by the author of The Prophet-a philosopher at his window commenting on the scene passing below. ''It is my opinion, and I have often heard others express it as their own, that there is not in the language another book of its character, a book that has not only three dimensions -height, depth, and breadth -but also the fourth dimension, timelessness, which is but another word for time unbounded, limitless. . . . Sand and Foam is a book that will penetrate the consciousness deeply and inevitably, as The Prophet has done." | The Muqaddimah, or "Introduction,"
is the earliest critical study of history, the work of the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldûn,
written in 1377 as the preface and first book of a world history. Though it is the
preliminary section of the history, the Mupaddimah has become known as a self-contained
work, treating in almost encyclopedic detail the general problems of the philosophy of
history and sociology. The first complete English translation, by Franz Rosenthal, with a
long introduction, notes, bibliography, and indexes, was published in three volumes in
1958 as part of Bollingen Series, and received immediate acclaim in this country and
abroad. The aim of this abridged edition is to give a concise and coherent version
containing all essentials of literary, historical, and philosophical value in a single
volume without losing sight of the author's argument "Undoubtedly the greatest work
of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place . . . the most
comprehensive and illuminating analysis of how human affairs work that has been made
anywhere."-Arnold J. Toynbee, Observer "For the reader who would like to know what Ibn Khaldûn himself actually said, the new volume edited by Mr. N. J. Dawood provides an excellent introduction. Mr. Dawood has already shown his skiff as a translator of the Koran and of the Thousand and One Nights. . . . Using as his base the monumental three-volume translation by Professor Rosenthal of Yale, he has, by skillful abridgment and deft but unobtrusive editing, produced an attractive and manageable volume, which should make the essential ideas of Ibn Khaldûn accessible to a wide circle of readers."-The Times Literary Supplement |
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| Publisher: | Alfred A. Knopf | Publisher: | Princeton / Bollingen | ||||
| ISBN: | 0-394-44369-1 | ISBN: | 0-691-0 1754-9 | ||||
Copyright © 1997 Avraham Elarar All Rights Reserved
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For more information please send e-mail to:avraham@al-andaluz.com
Revised: November 20, 2002.