BOOKS RECEIVED

NON-FICTION

Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, Al-Shidyaq to Darwish by Jeffrey Sacks comprises close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and addresses the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn. Published by Fordham University Press, April 2015. ISBN: 9780823264957, 352pp, Pbk, £18.99/$28.00

Library of Arabic Literature General Editor: Philip F. Kennedy

What Isa Ibn Hisham told us, Or, a period of time (Volumes 1 & 2) was written in the early 20th century by journalist Muhammad al-Muwaylihi and first published in serialized form in the newspaper Misbah al-Sharq (Light of the East). In the first volume, the protagonist, Isa ibn Hisham, and his friend Pasha give a satirical and critical account of life in Cairo during the British occupation, underlying the clash between tradition and imported value. In the second volume, while in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, Isa ibn Hisham gives a critical account of the European society, modernity and Western Imperialism. Edited and Translated by Roger Allen, NYU Press, USA, 2015, Vol 1: ISBN: 978-1-4798-1388-9, 496pp; Vol 2: ISBN: 978-1-4798-6225-2, 416pp. Both Hbk, $40.00/£25.99 each.

Consorts of the Caliphs. Women and the Court of Baghdadis a compilation of biographical sketches spanning more than 500 years of thirty-nine concubines or wives of Abbasid caliphs and sultans, written by the prolific Baghdadi scholar Ibn al-Sa’i (1196/7–1276). Edited by Shawkat M. Toorawa and introduced by Julia Bray, this is the only text of Ibn alSa’i that has survived in its entirety until today. The bilingual edition is illustrated with maps of the Abbasid Caliphate and Baghdad. Translated by the editors of the Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press, USA, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-4798-5098-3, 226 pp, Hbk, $30.00/£19.99.

212 BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015