Etel Adnan

A heart-rending meditation on aging, grief, and the universal experience of facing deathShifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan's window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.

Shifting the Silence

Fiction. Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege. SITT MARIE ROSE, an SPD bestseller, is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, it won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages.

A Novel

Sitt Marie Rose

A luminescent new book by one of our leading innovative writers

Night

As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, syntactic pleasures at once.

Sea and Fog

Fiction. Etel Adnan's novel "PARIS, WHEN IT'S NAKED amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French Capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of SITT MARIE-ROSE, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indespensable book by an indispensable writer" -Morgan Gibson.

Paris, when It's Naked

A haunting exploration of identity, history, displacement, and war from an Arab American perspective

In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country

In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other

There

Translated from the French and with drawings by the author.

The Arab Apocalypse

Nonfiction. "Written against the background of war at the turn of this century, this millennium - the Gulf War, the Lebanese civil war and the military occupations of that country, the author's country of origin - these letters, OF CITIES AND WOMEN, are in their turn now letters to cities and women - that we, that is, women and men alike, might eventually, before it is too late, 'find the right geography for our revelations'" - Barbara Harlow.

Letters to Fawwaz

Of Cities and Women

Letters to an exiled Lebanese writer and journal editor about feminism, written between 1990 and 1992.

Sarah Riggs

Time

Poetry. "In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory realitites: `in/tense/in/season'"--Rosmari e Waldrop. Other titles by Etel Adnan, available from SPD include, THERE: IN THE LIGHT AND THE DARKNESS OF THE SELF AND OF THE OTHER; OF CITIES & WOMEN (LETTERS TO FAWWAZ); PARIS, WHEN IT'S NAKED; and THE ARAB APOCALYPSE.

In/somnia

an Etel Adnan reader

To look at the sea is to become what one is

The master of the eclipse

Der Preis der Liebe, den wir nicht zahlen wollen

Literary Nonfiction. JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS is an essay on Nature, Art, and the relationship between them. Highly original in both content and literary structure, it provides a new outlook on the importance of Nature as an element of thinking; one of the major works on the "spirit of place" in contemporary literature. This book is illustrated with 17 drawings by the author. "An enlightening journey for those who love the mountain, and for those who love Etel Adnan."--Wendell Berry

An Essay

Journey to Mount Tamalpais

"Originally published in 1986, Journey to Mount Tamalpais is at once a love letter and a deep study in prose and drawings of and to a mountain, a landscape, a geological presence, a place. With a career spanning decades, genres, and nations, Etel Adnan's contributions to the fields of poetry, painting, philosophy, and journalism are indelible. In Journey to Mount Tamalpais, her alchemical command of language is enhanced by the use of painting and drawing as exploratory tools to express that which lies beyond the reach of the written word. This volume remains one of her most beloved works and a stunning example of her marriage of the visual and literary arts. A prose essay written with the lyricism and precision of a master poet, Journey to Mount Tamalpais documents Adnan's encounter with the Mountain, as both its witness and its collaborator. This expanded second edition includes an afterword by Omar Berrada and nine new drawings by the author"--

Journey to Mount Tamalpais, 2nd Edition

The 4th volume in the Performance Ideas series. A collection of literary texts, poems, plays, paintings, and drawings, accompanied by an interview on poetry and painting with the author.

The Sun on the Tongue

Poetry. "A series of meditations following the sun, SEASONS arrives in mesmerizing waves of observation and reflection. The blue depths of Adnan's inquiry--into the nature of Being, Time, knowledge itself--crest moment upon moment of quiet revelation, as the passions of history, myth, today, and yesterday rage and subside beneath her watchful eye. 'To think is not to contemplate, it's to witness.' So stanzas wash upon the page's horizon, ever moving toward the mind's encounters with the world. Intimate with ephemera, alert to what's hidden, SEASONS seeks the universe within and beyond the spirit's changeable weather, finding everywhere its center"--Megan Pruiett. Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American feminist painter and poet. Other Adnan titles available from SPD include THE ARAB APOCALYPSE, IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF ANOTHER COUNTRY, and IN/SOMNIA.

Seasons

Poetry. " With this book of poems Etel Adnan establishes herself as a major poet who belongs beside internationally acclaimed poets like Transtromer, Bly, Neruda, Vallejo, and Pessoa" -Eric Sellin.

Etel Adnan

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