Even before Islam, poetry was at the heart of Arabic culture. It developed wherever Arabic came to be spoken, from Damascus to Fez, Baghdad to Cairo, as well as in the Arabian heartland. This book takes us on a poetic journey through the classical age of Arabic poetry, from the years AD 600-1000. This collection is newly selected and translated by T. J. Gorton. It attempts to convey the spirit and, when possible, something of the rhythms of this highly musical verse

The idea of Moorish Spain captures the modern imagination, with its tales of knowledge shared across the borders of medieval Islam and Christendom, and of courts resounding to the gentle oriental strains of lute and ney. Yet it is an elusive place, glimpsed in the haunted emptiness of the Alhambra's gilded halls or amidst the pillars of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. This collection of its poetry, in a sparkling new translation by T. J. Gorton, fills those deserted spaces with the Moorish lust for life, and with a near-suffocating desire for love and for the rich enchantments of wine, laughter, moonlit picnics, and bare flesh.

Jerusalem has a special status as a city that is both terrestrial and celestial. The name includes a cognate for 'peace, ' but the old stones of the city have witnessed epic bloodshed and destruction over the centuries. The three great monotheistic religions all regard it with especial fervor, and it has for at least two millennia attracted pilgrims intent on seeing it before they die. This rich and compelling anthology of travelers' writings attempts to convey something of the diverse experiences of visitors to this most complex and enigmatic of cities. A Jerusalem Anthology takes us on a journey through a city, not just of illusion and powerful accumulated religious emotion, but of colors, lights, smells, and sounds, an inhabited city as it was directly experienced and lived in through the ages. Memoirs of visitors such as as sixth-century AD pilgrim Saint Silvia of Bordeaux, medieval Jerusalemite al-Muqaddasi, Grand Tour voyagers Gustave Flaubert and Alexander Kinglake, the humorous Mark Twain, or the cynical T.E. Lawrence provide vivid and sometimes disturbing vignettes of the Holy City at very different times in its tumultuous history.

Beirut has seen many armies and empires come and go, but the legacy of this long history is not so much in surviving monuments as in the quintessential Levantine spirit of the people. A commercial hub since the days of the Phoenicians, it was a centre of learning under the Romans, its law school preeminent in the Empire. Beirut was the point of entry to the Levant for many Europeans and Americans undertaking a Grand Tour or a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and visitors (whether their focus was piously Biblical or more prosaic) recorded their impressions of this effervescent port city where East rubs against West. A Beirut Anthology gathers the choicest of these, from writers as diverse as Alphonse de Lamartine and Mark Twain, providing a surprising and vivid glimpse behind the veil of this elusive and alluring city.