A brotherly love story Aloush is the youngest in the family. His big brother Ramez is his idol. Every day, Ramez drives Aloush to school on his way to work. He takes him to basketball practice, allows him to hang around when his friends come over to watch a football game and always has time to drop him off at the mall to see a movie with his friends. But suddenly, Ramez doesn't have time for Aloush anymore. He has fallen in love and is about to get engaged! Aloush is upset and tries to get rid of this "threat" by carrying out a series of pranks. Will Aloush succeed in getting his brother back? Heart warming love story between brothers; Helps little ones dealing with change in their family; Beautifully illustrated with bright colors that pop off the page.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women's work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.

A fresh, daring voice in arabic literature today. Alexandra Chreiteh's Ali and his Russian Mother is at once an ordinary and extraordinary story of two young people in Lebanon. At the outbreak of the July War in 2006, the novel's unnamed young protagonist reconnects with her childhood friend and develops a little crush on him, as they flee the bombs unleashed upon their country by Israel. Displaced, along with a million others across the country, she and her Russian mother have joined an evacuation for Russian citizens, when she again meets up with Ali, her former schoolmate from the South, who also has a Russian (Ukrainian) mother. As the two friends reunite, chat, and bond during a harrowing bus caravan across the Syrian border to Lattakia, en route to Moscow, Chreiteh's unique, comic sense of the absurd speaks to contradictions faced by a young generation in Lebanon now, sounding out taboos surrounding gender, sexual, religious, and national identities. Carrying Russian passports like their mothers--both of whom married Lebanese men and settled there--they are forced to reflect upon their choices, and lack of them, in a country that is yet again being torn apart by violent conflict. Like Chreiteh's acclaimed first novel, Always Coca-Cola, this story employs deceptively simple language and style to push the boundaries of what can be talked about in Arabic fiction. Again focused on the preoccupations of young people and their hopes for the future, Ali and his Russian Mother represents a fresh, daring voice in Arabic literature today.

Fitness is hard. Very hard. Everyone knows it is, but everyone is also willing to risk time and money on the mythology of easy fitness. If anyone, ANYONE, tells you that there is an "EASY" way to fitness, they just want your money. FIT is a book about how to get fit. It defines what fitness is in measurable, observable, and real-world terms. There is no mumbo-jumbo, just facts, practical information, and a logical approach to creating fitness from the first day of training through the day you reach your goal in fitness. No other training resource provides the reader the programming basics to specialize in one component of fitness or seamlessly program for comprehensive fitness and take the trainee from beginner to intermediate then to advanced and beyond - it's a book for a lifetime of training. Exercise is dangerous - from 1 yard to 100 miles, 1 pound to half a ton, on land, in the water, on a bike - hazards abound and you need to pay attention to what your body tells you. But the body can adapt to much more than we give it credit for. If you use the concepts in FIT - no excuses, no whining, no shortcuts - and just get to the gym, garage, or wherever, and train hard, you will amaze yourself with results and how fast they are earned.

Black-Arab political and cultural solidarity has had a long and rich history in the United States. That alliance is once again exerting a powerful influence on American society as Black American and Arab American activists and cultural workers are joining forces in formations like the Movement for Black Lives and Black for Palestine to address social justice issues. In Breaking Broken English, Hartman explores the historical and current manifestations of this relationship through language and literature, with a specific focus on Arab American literary works that use the English language creatively to put into practice many of the theories and ideas advanced by Black American thinkers. Breaking Broken English shows how language is the location where literary and poetic beauty meet the political in creative work. Hartman draws out thematic connections between Arabs/Arab Americans and Black Americans around politics and culture and also highlights the many artistic ways these links are built. She shows how political and cultural ideas of solidarity are written in creative texts and emphasizes their potential to mobilize social justice activists in the United States and abroad in the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine.

Joseph, Jesus and Job are all immediately recognizable religious figures in both Christianity and Islam who have been incorporated into a range of artistic and literary projects both inside and outside the Arab world. This book examines how three Lebanese women authors borrow and use these religious figures within their works of creative fiction: Huda Barakat re-casts the Qur'anic Yusuf in 1980s Lebanon during the Civil War and rewrites his relationship with Zulaykha in Hajar al-dahik, Jesus appears in the guise of a Lebanese peasant called Hamad in Najwa Barakat's novel told through four 'tales', Hayat wa alam Hamad ibn Silana, and Andree Chedid reclaims an individual voice, story and life for her work's title character in La femme de Job. The book argues that through the use of religious figures in secular works, authors draw on the imaginative power that the sacred texts hold in the public imagination in order to strengthen and solidify textual messages. This study proposes that the social, political and literary contributions of these works are interlinked and that their messages emerge through their innovations and artistry as creative works. Some of the issues engaged in these novels that are discussed in the book include: equality between the sexes, relationships between men and women, challenging fixed and rigid gender identities, questioning confessional and religious loyalties, and working against violence and war. Joseph, Jesus and Job: Reading Rescriptings of Religious Figures in Lebanese Women's Fiction uses the dual critical frameworks of intertextuality and post colonial feminist theory in order to develop a reading method through which to understand these texts and together with and in relation to a series of contexts. The question of how to define and categorize literary works and the usefulness of this is explored through a discussion of each works' multiple contexts - are these Arabic, French, and/or francophone novels? Should they be understood as Arab, Lebanese, and/or Third World texts? As women's literature? All of the works treated in this study are placed in dialogue with a number of other literary works both within Lebanon and beyond it. The book therefore contributes to discussions and debates both within and outside the field of Near Eastern, and specifically Arab, literary studies.

Black-Arab political and cultural solidarity has had a long and rich history in the United States. That alliance is once again exerting a powerful influence on American society as Black American and Arab American activists and cultural workers are joining forces in formations like the Movement for Black Lives and Black for Palestine to address social justice issues. In Breaking Broken English, Hartman explores the historical and current manifestations of this relationship through language and literature, with a specific focus on Arab American literary works that use the English language creatively to put into practice many of the theories and ideas advanced by Black American thinkers. Breaking Broken English shows how language is the location where literary and poetic beauty meet the political in creative work. Hartman draws out thematic connections between Arabs/Arab Americans and Black Americans around politics and culture and also highlights the many artistic ways these links are built. She shows how political and cultural ideas of solidarity are written in creative texts and emphasizes their potential to mobilize social justice activists in the United States and abroad in the ongoing struggle for the liberation of Palestine.

Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language literary work speak Arabic? In Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary French, with sometimes surprising results. Challenging the common claim that these writers express a Francophile or ""colonized"" consciousness, this book demonstrates how Lebanese women writers actively question the political and cultural meaning of writing in French in Lebanon. Hartman argues that their innovative language inscribes messages about society into their novels by disrupting class-status hierarchies, narrow ethno-religious identities, and rigid gender roles. Because the languages of these texts reflect the crucial issues of their times, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk guides the reader through three key periods of Lebanese history: the French Mandate and Early Independence, the Civil War, and the postwar period. Three novels are discussed in each time period, exposing the contours of how the authors ""write Arabic in French"" to invent new literary languages.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women's work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.

Understanding the complexities of Arab politics, history, and culture has never been more important for North American readers. Yet even as Arabic literature is increasingly being translated into English, the modern Arabic literary tradition is still often treated as other?controversial, dangerous, difficult, esoteric, or exotic. This volume examines modern Arabic literature in context and introduces creative teaching methods that reveal the literature's richness, relevance, and power to anglophone students. Addressing the complications of translation head on, the volume interweaves such important issues such as gender, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the status of Arabic literature in world literature. Essays cover writers from the recent past, like Emile Habiby and Tayeb Salih; contemporary Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian literatures; and the literature of the nineteenth-century Nahda.