For decades now, the Middle East has been torn by violent conflicts of the most savage kind. There have been five Arab-Israeli wars; wars between other states; numerous civil wars, small and large; struggles by women, students, workers, peasants; religious and class battles. Innumerable books on these subjects have been published; however, "Forbidden Agendas: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East," a collection of seventeen articles from the journal Khamsin, stands alone.
The contributors - who hail from Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran - tackle themes proscribed in much of the region, such as Oriental Jews and Palestinian workers in Israel; women in Israel and the Arab countries; the politics of religion and religious revivalism in the Arab world, Iran, and Israel; the civil war in Lebanon and so on. Moreover, these themes are treated in unorthodox ways: few of these articles are likely to please committed partisans of any of the contending political forces.
Readers of this anthology will find iconoclastic analysis of some of the issues underlying the many conflicts of the region, in the place of the usual repetitions of commonplace claims and the banal jargon of Middle Eastern politics, whether left or right.

A classic medieval mystery from the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, a writer in the class of Atwood, Coetzee, Marquez, and Rushdie An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?

The author has combed the works of contemporary Arab chronicles of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants. He retells their story and offers insights into the historical forces that shape Arab and Islamic consciousness today.

Recent trends in Marxist economic theory have sponsored the methods of modern logic and mathematics. In doing so, they have displaced not only the relatively philosophical style of reflection found in Capital but also certain key problems addressed there by Marx. Ulrich Krause breaks new ground by applying mathematical techniques in an analysis of labor, money and exchange. Rejecting the notion of "homogeneous labor" as a basis of value theory, Krause develops his own understanding of the Marxist concept of "abstract labor," which he then integrates with an analysis of money in the process of commodity exchange. His book concludes with a new discussion of Marx's theory of value and surplus-value. Money & Abstract Labour is a major intervention in one of the most vigorously contested areas of contemporary economic theory.