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Walid Ikhlassi evokes the individual's struggle for dignity and significance in the Syrian city of Aleppo during the French mandate of the forties and fifties. His characters' seeking of personal fulfillment parallels the struggle of the nation for self-definition. The changing political and cultural landscape of Syria challenges individuals in their attempts to live lives of integrity, as Ikhlassi provides analytical insights into the civil society of Syria, the axis of his writing.

From the boy Antara who personifies the Arab legend of a half-African slave warrior/hero to everyday middle-aged lovers, Ikhlassi's characters fight colonial oppression and corruption from the newly formed government. Foreign and internal forces challenge the evolution of a modern nation rooted in traditional Arab values. Its strong and determined men and women refuse to accept victimhood. The introduction by author and critic Elizabeth Warnock Fernea places the stories in their historical and literary context.

An avowed experimentalist, Ikhlassi portrays the modern human situation through techniques as widely divergent as realism, surrealism, interior monologue, and stream-of-consciousness. Selections of his work have been translated into English, Russian, French, German, Dutch, Armenian, and other languages.

A manufactured and pre-programmed serial killer; a suicidal robot; a romantic necrophiliac; and an archaeologist who feeds the perverse desires of aficionados of the apocalypse—Francisco García Gonzalez's stories map out literary and metafictional approaches to the sci-fi universe in ways that echo the humor and violence of Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosa Montero, and Roberto Bolaño.

With a scholarly introduction by translator Bradley J. Nelson that introduces García González's oeuvre to contemporary readers and scholars of Spanish-language literature, this science fiction collection introduces Anglophones to this unique author.

García González turns a black mirror on contemporary society and its relation both to history and to the future. His insightfulness and relevance draw comparisons with Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and China Miéville, though his verbal economy and elegance are more akin to Cormac McCarthy, producing both disturbingly uncanny violence and unexpected comedy.

The Western African Republic of Benin (formerly Dahomey) is gifted with a great folktale tradition, one of the richest in the world. As pieces of oral literature and cultural history, these tales shed light on some of the values and beliefs as well as the customs and traditions of the people of Benin.

Written during the final stages of the Indian Independence movement, between the gloom and angst of the interwar period and at the cusp of the beginning of modern India, Bhuwaneshwar’s short stories both capture the melancholy of the time and ask what it means to be human in an indifferent and amoral world. These stories are truly an event in the history of modern Hindi literature—his work marks a complete break from the neo-romanticism and mysticism of his predecessors and contemporaries and establishes him as the definitive founder of the modern Hindi short story. His stories are populated with lonely characters from all walks of life: doctors, students, nomadic communities, acrobats, single mothers, soldiers returning from war, neglected children, and more. They are people living on the margins, introspecting their own anxieties and existence in an increasingly uncertain world set in places as far apart as hill stations, anonymous Indian villages, highways, railway compartments, and small towns in France.

This new collection includes all of Bhuwaneshwar’s twelve published short stories, none of which have been translated into English before now. Cinematic and peerless, these tales combine images, sketches, sounds, fragments, dialogues, and frame-narrative techniques of Indian folktales, ultimately creating a montage of modern Indian psyche not found in any other work of Hindi literature. Nearly a century old, Bhuwaneshwar’s stories read like they were written in modern day, dealing with questions and anxieties that continue to haunt and reappear, much like his iconic wolves, in the twenty-first century.  
 

In many places around the world, flutes and the sounds of flutes are powerful magical forces for seduction and love, protection, vegetal and human fertility, birth and death, and other aspects of human and nonhuman behavior. This book explores the cultural significance of flutes, flute playing, and flute players from around the world as interpreted from folktales, myths, and other stories--in a word, ""flutelore."" A scholarly yet readable study, World Flutelore: Folktales, Myths, and Other Stories of Magical Flute Power draws upon a range of sources in folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and literary analysis.

Describing and interpreting many examples of flutes as they are found in mythology, poetry, lyrics, and other narrative and literary sources from around the world, veteran ethnomusicologist Dale Olsen seeks to determine what is singularly distinct or unique about flutes, flute playing, and flute players in a global context. He shows how and why flutes are important for personal, communal, religious, spiritual, and secular expression and even, perhaps, existence. This is a book for students, scholars, and any reader interested in the cultural power of flutes.