Selections from The Art of Party Crashing in Medieval Iraq

Author: Al-Khatib Al-Baghdadi
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815632983
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
He’s fond of anyone who throws a party; he’s always at a party in his dreams, for party-crashing’s blazoned on his heart . . . a prisoner to the path of fi ne cuisine. With this statement, al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, a Muslim preacher and scholar, introduces The Art of Party-Crashing, a book that represents a sharp departure from the religious scholarship for which he is known. Compiled in the eleventh century, this collection of irreverent and playful anecdotes celebrates eating, drinking, and general merriment. Ribald jokes, flirtations, and wry observations of misbehaving Muslims acquaint readers with everyday life in medieval Iraq in a way that is both entertaining and edifying. Selove’s translation, accompanied by her whimsical drawings, introduces the delights and surprises of medieval Arabic humor to a new audience.

Selections from The Art of Party Crashing in Medieval Iraq

Author: Al-Khatib Al-Baghdadi
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815651791
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Hikayat Abi al-Qasim

Author: Selove Emily Selove
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474402321
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Hikayat Abu al-Qasim, probably written in the 11th century by the otherwise unknown al-Azdi, tells the story of a gate-crasher from Baghdad named Abu al-Qasim, who shows up uninvited at a party in Isfahan. Dressed as a holy man and reciting religious poetry, he soon relaxes his demeanour, and, growing intoxicated on wine, insults the other dinner guests and their Iranian hometown. Widely hailed as a narrative unique in the history of Arabic literature, a ikA yah also reflects a much larger tradition of banquet texts. Painting a picture of a party-crasher who is at once a holy man and a rogue, he is a figure familiar to those who have studied the ancient cynic tradition or other portrayals of wise fools, tricksters and saints in literatures from the Mediterranean and beyond. This study therefore compares a ikA yah, a mysterious text surviving in a single manuscript, to other comical banquet texts and party-crashing characters, both from contemporary Arabic literature and from Ancient Greece and Rome.

Tenth of December

Author: George Saunders
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408837358
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
The prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection from the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo 'The best book you'll read this year' New York Times 'Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America' Sunday Times WINNER OF THE 2014 FOLIO PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013 George Saunders's most wryly hilarious and disturbing collection yet, Tenth of December illuminates human experience and explores figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations. A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for all occasions; Jeff faces horrifying ultimatums and the prospect of Darkenfloxx(TM) in some unusual drug trials; and Al Roosten hides his own internal monologue behind a winning smile that he hopes will make him popular. With dark visions of the future riffing against ghosts of the past and the ever-settling present, this collection sings with astonishing charm and intensity.

Popeye and Curly

Author: Emily Selove
Publisher: Silver Goat Media
ISBN: 9781944296193
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
Enjoy one hundred and twenty scenes from the vibrant city of Abbasid Baghdad, starring book-loving author Popeye (Al-Jahiz) and winebibbing poet Curly (Abu Nuwas), along with their friends Coral (a singing girl) and the Caliph of one of the world's most influential empires in history. Each episode is derived from historical sources, and designed to entertain, educate, and amaze.

The Cult of Smart

Author: Fredrik deBoer
Publisher: All Points Books
ISBN: 1250200385
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

The Doctors' Dinner Party

Author: Ibn Buṭlān
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479827487
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
A witty satire of the medical profession The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an eleventh-century satire in the form of a novella, set in a medical milieu. A young doctor from out of town is invited to dinner with a group of older medical men, whose conversation reveals their incompetence. Written by the accomplished physician Ibn Buṭlān, the work satirizes the hypocrisy of quack doctors while displaying Ibn Buṭlān’s own deep technical knowledge of medical practice, including surgery, blood-letting, and medicines. He also makes reference to the great thinkers and physicians of the ancient world, including Hippocrates, Galen, and Socrates. Combining literary parody with social satire, the book is richly textured and carefully organized: in addition to the use of the question-and-answer format associated with technical literature, it is replete with verse and subtexts that hint at the infatuation of the elderly practitioners with their young guest. The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an entertaining read in which the author skewers the pretensions of the physicians around the table.

The Abbasid Caliphate

Author: Tayeb El-Hibri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107183243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
A history of the Abbasid Caliphate from its foundation in 750 and golden age under Harun al-Rashid to the conquest of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, this study examines the Caliphate as an empire and an institution, and its imprint on the society and culture of classical Islamic civilization.

Words that Tear the Flesh

Author: Stephen Alan Baragona
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110562251
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
The rhetorical trope of irony is well-trod territory, with books and essays devoted to its use by a wide range of medieval and Renaissance writers, from the Beowulf-poet and Chaucer to Boccaccio and Shakespeare; however, the use of sarcasm, the "flesh tearing" form of irony, in the same literature has seldom been studied at length or in depth. Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to pick out in a written text, since it relies so much on tone of voice and context. This is the first book-length study of medieval and Renaissance sarcasm. Its fourteen essays treat instances in a range of genres, both sacred and secular, and of cultures from Anglo-Saxon to Arabic, where the combination of circumstance and word choice makes it absolutely clear that the speaker, whether a character or a narrator, is being sarcastic. Essays address, among other things, the clues writers give that sarcasm is at work, how it conforms to or deviates from contemporary rhetorical theories, what role it plays in building character or theme, and how sarcasm conforms to the Christian milieu of medieval Europe, and beyond to medieval Arabic literature. The collection thus illuminates a half-hidden but surprisingly common early literary technique for modern readers.

Talking to Strangers

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316535621
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.