This open access book explores literary works and practices - always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations - in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures. These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions - including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific - are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Across generations and genres, comics have imagined different views of the future, from unattainable utopias to worrisome dystopias. These presaging narratives can be read as reflections of their authors' (and readers') hopes, fears and beliefs about the present. This collection of new essays explores the creative processes in comics production that bring plausible futures to the page. The contributors investigate portrayals in different stylistic traditions-manga, bande desinees-from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The disparate yet coherent picture that emerges documents the elaborate storylines and complex universes comics creators have been crafting for decades.

The Craft of Editing offers a rare insight into the unique dynamic between author and editor. In this illuminating book, Adnan Mahmutovic and Lucy Durneen lead a cohort of industry experts to bring transparency to the mystique that often surrounds the craft and practice of editing. Using genuine case studies from published works - including annotated manuscripts - this book prepares writers for potential dialogue and critique from editors. The Craft of Editing follows the journey from rough draft to publication, an essential part of any writing experience, while showing the singular and authentic approach each editor takes. Using original pitches, debates, emails, and instant messages to shed light on the collaboration between authors and editors, The Craft of Editing is an indispensable tool to creative writers and students alike.

The Craft of Editing offers a rare insight into the unique dynamic between author and editor. In this illuminating book, Adnan Mahmutovic and Lucy Durneen lead a cohort of industry experts to bring transparency to the mystique that often surrounds the craft and practice of editing. Using genuine case studies from published works - including annotated manuscripts - this book prepares writers for potential dialogue and critique from editors. The Craft of Editing follows the journey from rough draft to publication, an essential part of any writing experience, while showing the singular and authentic approach each editor takes. Using original pitches, debates, emails, and instant messages to shed light on the collaboration between authors and editors, The Craft of Editing is an indispensable tool to creative writers and students alike.

Joseph Schneider grows up in a Cherokee-Jewish family in the Smokey mountains of North Carolina. He dreams to be a cook on the biggest ship there is in the world but his attachment to his mother Rachel and his rootedness to the little mountain village keep him from moving on. When his mother falls ill she reveals she stole him from a Palestinian girl Aliya in the 80s when she volunteered at a hospital in Gaza. Joseph refuses to know anything more about his biological mother, but later when Rachel dies, Joseph honors his promise to her and embarks on a painful pilgrimage to the holy land, a walk in the footsteps of his American mother and a search for Aliya.

Iconic migrant writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri use their fictional worlds to articulate the ways in which existential "nervous conditions," caused by violent postcolonial history, drive individuals to rework the critical notions of freedom, authenticity and community. This existential thread in their works has been largely ignored or left undeveloped in criticism. Although Rushdie has argued that they primarily write back to the imperial centre(s), in their signature novels, "The English Patient," "Midnight's Children "and "The Famished Road," they respond to their conflicting cultural and ethnic heritages by dramatizing characters in traumatic struggles with belonging and affiliation. As a way of coping with their identity crises, most characters succumb to the political rhetoric of communalism. The central characters, however, are driven by a powerful desire for self-sufficiency. Yet, since this individualism clashes with their need for communal sharing, they enact a form of creative destruction of their singular selfhood and communal identity. They experience a certain plurality of singular selfhood and participate in forms of "inoperative communities," which elicit bonds without ties and coexistence without the necessity of a common work and essence.

This open access book explores literary works and practices – always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations – in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures. These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions – including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific – are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Inside this book bursts a kaleidoscope of characters in historical settings from the Balkans to Scandinavia, which they seek to escape, fit in, or change. Following a few female leads after they leave war-torn Bosnia, this book compresses simmering emotions ranging from loss, fear, love, hate, revenge, displacement, regret, humor, and hope. Almasa, the main character in most stories, is feisty and funny, and she suffers no fools. She will go to any length to take charge of her broken life and avoid being labeled a victim. Fatima is like her subtler sister, but no less determined to turn the tables on her horrible fate. In between them are pieces of the author's life, as fictionalized as the lives of the two women are real. Each story, although compact and unique on its own, is tied to all other stories, chronologically, emotionally, or thematically. Together they probe the margins of our contemporary history and give voice to people pushed to the edge of life.