In Egypt’s eastern province, the annual Arabian Horse Festival celebrates the deep historical connection between the province, the Arabian horse, and the settlement of Bedouin tribes in Egypt during the 7th century. Except that, according to Yossef Rapoport’s new book, Becoming Arab, this perceived connection doesn’t represent a historical event, but rather a lengthy process of ethnogenesis. For the conquering Arab armies settled in the cities of Egypt, not in the countryside, where Islam remained a minority religion for centuries. Yet today, many Egyptians consider themselves scions of ancient Arab tribes, just as they see their horses as pure blood Arabs. How and when did this Arab identity take hold in Egypt?
Rika Hourachi has an unusual talent. She’s fluent in conversational Latin. It makes her the perfect hire for an odd position at a nearby museum. The staff needs someone to keep one of their marble statues company. The first century Roman copy of a Greek statue of Aphrodite is lonely. After all, all the other art in the room speaks Greek. A deeply lonely human being, Rika quickly falls in love with the marble goddess.
You come across them in used book stores, with their fading, cloth covers, their saccharine prose, with black and white photos of palaces and tennis courts. These are the memoirs of princesses from the house of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, of Zog of Albania, or the Dogras of Kashmir. It’s easy to forget that behind the overthrow of these sad, sentimental royal exiles, major political and social forces were at work: Imran Mulla’s The Indian Caliphate takes what would otherwise have been a trite tale of dethroned dynasties and brings to life the passions and controversies that stirred the early 20th century, and which have not really calmed down even in our own.
The Great Wave is perhaps the most famous piece of Japanese artwork: a roaring blue wave and three boats on the ocean. And far in the background is Mt Fuji. And that’s actually what Hokusai’s famous woodprint is about: Mt Fuji, volcano and Japan’s tallest mountain.
Best-known for her award-winning novels, Anuradha Roy’s first work of non-fiction Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, is a well-written book that goes beyond the boundaries of memoir and travelogue to examine the shifting life of a Himalayan valley through both anthropological and social lenses. The author and her partner retreat from the cacophony of city life, seeking solace and self-discovery in the mountains. Their decision to leave the freneticism of Delhi is also an act of resistance—an attempt to step away from an “externally moulded cultural change” and to understand how identity transforms in a vastly different landscape.
Awarded Japan’s Yomiuri Prize for Literature, The Summer House is Masashi Matsuie’s debut novel. Also published as Summer at Mount Asama, the 2012 work reaches English readers through Margaret Mitsutani’s expert translation. Matsuie constructs the story just as his character Sensei, architect Shunsuke Murai designs buildings: with deceptive ease, creating spaces that beckon people to withdraw from the noise of the outside world. “You don’t want to talk loudly in one of Sensei’s houses,” explains the narrator.
Indian epics seem to have an endless supply of characters for those who wish to retell the narrative from different angles. In Bhima’s Wife, Kavita Kané keeps Hidimbi at the centre to show the Great War unfolding that brings death and destruction to everyone.
Studio Ghibli’s 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies has been described as the greatest film someone will only watch once. Deeply emotional, director Isao Takahata’s tale of two Japanese war orphans struggling and failing to survive in the closing days of World War II is almost too painful to bear. But the story isn’t Takahata’s—Grave of the Fireflies is a loosely autobiographical novella by Japanese Renaissance man Akiyuki Nosaka. Available in English-language bookstores for the first time in translation by Ginny Tapely Takemori, the novella isn’t nearly as gut-wrenching as its visual counterpart. Instead, the narrator tells the story with matter-of-fact detachment that stirs up different emotions altogether.
Ringed by a snow-coated massif, the Dal Lake shimmers under the bright sun as the shikara canoes skim over its iridescent waters: this snapshot of Srinagar is almost ubiquitous on the Internet. Millions of vacationers who visit this place every year to unwind probably imagine this city as little more than a summer retreat.
The Assassins and the Templars: two groups that are now part of popular legend–and not just because of Assassin’s Creed, the massive video game franchise starring the former as its heroes, and the latter as its villains.
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