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In the Presence of Absence

Mahmoud Darwish, mHmwd drwysh · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Journal of an Ordinary Grief

Mahmoud Darwish · 177 pages

"First published in Beirut in 1973, these probing essays ask vital questions about the existentially complex realities the Palestinians in Israel face and the ambiguity of Darwish's own identity as an Israeli Palestian."--Title page verso.

Refugee ExperienceLyrical ProseCultural IdentityEssay Collection
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Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityPoetry CollectionLyrical Prose
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Citizen: An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine · 160 pages

You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary movement, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating sounds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because ju

Cultural IdentityPoetry CollectionEssay CollectionLyrical Prose
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Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “

Cultural IdentityLyrical ProseEssay CollectionBittersweet
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Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?

Mahmoud Darwish, Jeffrey Sacks · 197 pages

Since Mahmoud Darwish's death in 2008 his poetic writings continue to be read by an audience in awe. Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? is a collection of autobiographical poetry designed to give an insight into the wider human condition. Darwish's writing explores the meaning of life, identity and the impact of exile. Hailed as the most important Arab poet of the modern day, Darwish's voice has c

Refugee ExperiencePoetry CollectionLyrical ProseCultural Identity
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I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

Mourid Barghouti · 216 pages

In 2000 Mourid Barghouti published I Saw Ramallah, the acclaimed memoir that told of returning in 1996 to his Palestinian home for the first time since exile following the Six-Day War in 1967. I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family. Ironically, a few years lat

Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 108 pages

An epic poem set during the expulsion of the Acadians from Acadie, following the fictional Evangeline and her search for her lost love, Gabriel.

Refugee ExperiencePoetry CollectionLyrical ProseBittersweet
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The House at Tyneford

Natasha Solomons

Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri · 356 pages

Cultural IdentityRefugee ExperienceBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Native Guard

Natasha Trethewey · 57 pages

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey's elegiac *Native Guard* is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze a

Poetry CollectionLyrical ProseCultural IdentityBittersweet
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

Joan Didion · 238 pages

American novelist Joan Didion's first volume of nonfiction essays, first published in 1968, consisting of twenty works that reflect the atmosphere in America during the 1960s, especially in California.

Essay CollectionLyrical ProseCultural IdentityBittersweet
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Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.

Essay CollectionLyrical ProseCultural IdentityColonialism
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Salt Houses

Hala Alyan · 320 pages

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home ... On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they wi

Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityLyrical ProseBittersweet
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Dancing in Odessa

Ilya Kaminsky · 80 pages

Lyrical ProsePoetry CollectionCultural IdentityBittersweet
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The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

Cultural IdentityLyrical ProseBittersweetHaunting
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The Flame

Leonard Cohen · 277 pages

Poetry CollectionLyrical ProseBittersweetEssay Collection
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Time of White Horses

Ibrahim Nasrallah - ibrhym nSr llh · 643 pages

Set in Palestine, before the creation of the state of Israel, this lyrical and deftly written novel spans three generations living in the small village of Hadiya. Reaching back into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the immense history of this period is brought into focus by the very human stories of Hajj Mahmoud, his son Khaled, and grandson Naji. As the cruel hand of history hov

Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityLyrical ProseColonialism
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The Midnight Zoo

Sonya Hartnett · 192 pages

Twelve-year-old Andrej, nine-year-old Tomas, and their baby sister Wilma flee their Romany encampment when it is attacked by Germans during World War II, and in an abandoned town they find a zoo where the animals tell their stories, helping the children understand what has become of their lives and what it means to be free.

Refugee ExperienceBittersweetLyrical ProseHaunting
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for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Ntozake Shange · 64 pages

First published in 1975, Shange's choreopoem has been read and performed because it truly revealed what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. Here is the complete text, with stage directions of the dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

Poetry CollectionCultural IdentityLyrical ProseBittersweet
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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Dinaw Mengestu · 234 pages

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of f

Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityBittersweetMale Lead
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Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Marjane Satrapi · 187 pages

187 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmGN500L Lexile

Cultural IdentityRefugee ExperienceBittersweetNonfiction
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The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

Kao Kalia Yang · 294 pages

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to

Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityLyrical ProseNonfiction
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Lyrical ProsePoetry CollectionCultural IdentityBittersweet
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The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

Sandy Tolan · 362 pages

The true story of a friendship spanning religious divisions and four decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.In the summer of 1967, not long after the Six Day War, three young Palestinian men ventured into the town of Ramla in Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes, from which they and their families had been driven out nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had t

Refugee ExperienceCultural IdentityBittersweetNonfiction

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