The countries that stretch along the broad horizons of the Middle
East from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Pakistan boast different
cultures, different languages, and different religions. Yet the
literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound
together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common
experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected
scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza
Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven
translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how
literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an
extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.
Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international
exchange through translation and publication of the world s finest
literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the
twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman
past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last
hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental
collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including
short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama many of
them presented in English for the first time features translated
works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized
chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature from the
famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz
and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the
grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai connected by the
extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have
been all too often ignored by the Western canon. By shifting
America s perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion
and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region
through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells
an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual
information that places the writing within the historical,
political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet & Pen is
transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained
narrative, from the first page to the last. Creating a vital bridge
between two estranged cultures, "this is that rare anthology:
cohesive, affecting, and informing" (Publishers Weekly)."
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