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

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

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

Sea and Fog

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

In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country

Sarah Riggs

Time

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

Letters to Fawwaz

Of Cities and Women

an Etel Adnan reader

To look at the sea is to become what one is

Translated from the French and with drawings by the author.

The Arab Apocalypse

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

There

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.

The master of the eclipse

Der Preis der Liebe, den wir nicht zahlen wollen

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 evocative new book from one of our leading philosopher poets

Surge

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

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. " 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.

The Spring Flowers Own ; & The Manifestations of the Voyage

Que faire pour sortir du cercle de mort qui entoure le Moyen-Orient ? Née au Liban, ayant vécu principalement en Californie, ce problème est tout simplement la toile de fond de toute une vie. J’ai cru un moment que la solution était révolutionnaire et militaire. Mais la guerre civile au Liban m’a convaincue que les guerres font plus ajouter de nouveaux malheurs que résoudre des conflits. J’ai commencé à désirer la paix. La désirer fortement. C’est alors que la question s’est posée : quelle paix ? Que va vouloir dire cette paix ? J’ai compris que cette paix doit vouloir dire : accepter l’autre. L’ennemi qui est devenu au cours du temps réalité et mythe, corps et image. Dans ce cas particulier cela voudra dire aller chez l’autre et le laisser venir, l’accueillir. Ultimement, en faire un ami.

Etel Adnan

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