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4 books match the query 'Kermani, Navid'
In the Other Direction Now
Dispatches from East AfricaNavid Kermani
Haus Publishing, 2026
More than a travelogue: a work of human depth and understanding that has much to teach those interested in contemporary global affairs and postcolonial realities.
Navid Kermani is an acclaimed writer already well known in the English-speaking world for his books Upheaval: The Refugee Trekthrough Europe and Along the Trenches: A Journey through Eastern Europe to Isfahan. His new book, In the Other Direction Now, continues his thoughtful documentation of global peripheries. Visiting southern Madagascar, the Comoros, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sudan, Kermani examines how global fault lines converge, from postcolonial neglect and the devastating impact of climate change to the rising and often nefarious influence of China and the consequences of the Ukraine War.
Reflective, astute, and intellectually rigorous, Kermani’s empathetic yet unflinching perspective does not aim to interpret Africa for us, but to learn from it in all its variousness and multiplicity. Music emerges as a unifying thread—Christian hymns, Sufi dances, and Sudanese jazz become symbols of resilience and transformation, providing cultural links that bind communities across conflict, faith, and history and offering a counterpoint to colonial clichés and Western ignorance. These specific, grounded accounts of people and places contextualize global inequalities not as a product of some intrinsic African deficiency but as part of interconnected systems shaped by the Global North as much as by local governance and the legacy of colonialism.
Love Writ Large
Navid Kermani
Seagull Books, 2018
For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is in the crosshairs of the Cold War—and even the personal dramas of a small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear arms race. Kermani’s novel manages to capture these social tensions without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of first love and, in a unique touch, sets the boy’s struggles within the larger frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian mystics. His becomes a timeless tale that reflects on the multiple ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.
Paris, So to Speak
Navid Kermani
Seagull Books, 2022
A writer has penned a novel about the great love of his youth. After a public reading, he is approached by a woman he doesn’t recognize—but it’s his lover. He is the author; she, the figure in his novel. The young girl from back then has turned into an interesting and attractive woman—but she’s also married. Soon the situation becomes a little strange: they sit down together, have a glass of wine, talk about French romantic novels, ask each other what one expects of love when one grows older. And all the while her husband is sitting in the next room. How is this going to end? Navid Kermani has written a romantic novel like no other—surprising, witty, profound—and one can barely put it down.
What Makes a Man?
Sex Talk in Beirut and BerlinRashid al-Daif and Joachim Helfer. Translated by Ken Seigneurie and Gary Schmidt
University of Texas Press, 2015
In 2003, Lebanese writer Rashid al-Daif spent several weeks in Germany as part of the “West-East Divan” program, a cultural exchange effort meant to improve mutual awareness of German and Middle Eastern cultures. He was paired with German author Joachim Helfer, who then returned the visit to al-Daif in Lebanon. Following their time together, al-Daif published in Arabic a literary reportage of his encounter with Helfer in which he focuses on the German writer’s homosexuality. His frank observations have been variously read as trenchant, naïve, or offensive. In response, Helfer provided an equally frank point-by-point riposte to al-Daif’s text. Together these writers offer a rare exploration of attitudes toward sex, love, and gender across cultural lines. By stretching the limits of both fiction and essay, they highlight the importance of literary sensitivity in understanding the Other.
Rashid al-Daif’s “novelized biography” and Joachim Helfer’s commentary appear for the first time in English translation in What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin. Also included in this volume are essays by specialists in Arabic and German literature that shed light on the discourse around sex between these two authors from different cultural contexts.