Namir, a young Iraqi scholar with a PhD from Harvard, is hired by filmmakers to document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On an excursion to Baghdad, Namir ventures into al-Mutanabbi Street, famous for its bookshops, where he meets Wadud, an eccentric librarian who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by the war: from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna to human beings. Namir becomes obsessed with Wadud's archive and, looking back on his life in New York, discovers how deeply intertwined it is with fragments of his land's past and present. Almost a stylistically ambitious "landscape exercise" between the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

Sinan Antoon, born and raised in Baghdad, is a poet, novelist, translator and academic. He received a doctorate in Arabic Literature in the United States in 2006. His poems and essays have appeared in several journals, in English and Arabic. His published novels include 2010's Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman ("Only the Pomegranate"), winner of the Best Arab Book Award in 2014. He is currently an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya magazine.

There is the ocean. There is the sycamore, and the jujube too. There is the war. There are mothers, daughters. And there is the habaryar, the little mother. There are Mogadishu, Rome, the Europe of hers and the Europe from the African history. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's world unravels in a complex and clearly contemporary space, marked by profound references to an ancient wisdom and an often, but not always, dreamlike dimension. The first collection of short stories published in Italy includes the entire literary journey of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, as well as a series of poems and an unpublished play. The refinement of her language emerges powerfully, showing the international stature of one of the most interesting Italian writers on our artistic scene.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali and Italian writer and poet. Winner of the Lingua Madre Prize (2006) and Vittorini Prize (2008), she's the author of three novels: Madre piccola (Frassinelli, 2007; 66thand2nd, 2022), Il comandante del fiume (66thand2nd, 2014; 2022), Le stazioni della luna (66thand2nd, 2021) and the ekphrasis La danza dell'orice (Juxta Press, 2020) inspired by a work by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. In 2018 he worked on the rewriting of Antigone directed in Palermo by Giuseppe Massa and the libretto of the community opera Silent City for Matera 2019, directed by James Bonas with music composed by Nigel Osborne. He is a consultant for UNDP Somalia on the Oral History Histography for Peacebuilding project.

Turkey is a land torn between East and West, and between its glorious past and a dangerous, unpredictable future. After the violence of an attempted military coup against President Erdogan in 2016, an event which shocked the world, journalist and novelist Kaya Genc travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attack Istanbul, and journalists and teachers are imprisoned, he walks the streets of the famous Ottoman neighborhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who live among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations. The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between East and West, between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale.
Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview and his own autobiography, Genc takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.

Kaya Genç is a journalist, novelist, and essayist from Istanbul. He holds a PhD in English Literature and he is the author of four books, The Lion and the Nightingale (I.B. Tauris, 2019), Under the Shadow (I.B. Tauris, 2016), An Istanbul Anthology (American University in Cairo Press, 2015), and Macera (YKY, 2008). He has contributed essays and articles to the world's leading magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. The Atlantic selected Kaya's writing for the magazine's list of "Best Journalism Works of 2014".

First Italian translation of the writings of the blogger and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, one of the protagonists of the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution. The book comes out thanks to an international network of editors and journalists, to the author's family, to Amnesty International that for years follows the case of the writer still in prison, to ARCI and to the collaboration with the Fitzcarraldo publishing house in London that will concomitantly publish in the English translation. A volume capable of portraying the dramatic situation of Egypt in whose prisons it is estimated that over 60,000 political and prisoners of conscience are detained, subjected to torture, capital executions, unfair trial and long periods of preventive detention, in a clear violation of human and civil rights.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah, born in 1981 in Cairo, entered prison for the first time at the age of 25, in 2006. Egyptian authorities arrested him during a peaceful demonstration in Cairo. Having become the symbolic figure of Egyptian dissidence, he has spent the last six years always inside a cell, also deprived of books and writing paper. He is considered by Amnesty International to be a 'prisoner of conscience', the best known of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egyptian prisons. Son of the most important Egyptian family of activists and defenders of human and civil rights, Alaa embodies an entire generation of young Egyptians who put their lives and their intelligence at the service of the right to dignity, individual and collective.

Art and politics are fields that are strongly connected to each other, they attract and repel each other, draw continuity and cause ruptures. The essays collected in this volume are subject to the tension between these two forces. They are reflections on the contemporary condition, on the artistic practice, on the limits and potential of the museum: each text is located in time and space, and reflects the intellectual path of Manuel Borja-Villel, head of important museum institutions, and some of his curatorial concerns, as responsible for numerous exhibitions and public events over the last thirty years. A supporter of hybridization and sharing of knowledge, in front of the inaccessible compartmentalization of knowledge, this book is committed to interdisciplinary research and the interrelation of multiple fields. And it is, above all, an invitation to reflect on art, its organizations and its actors.

Manuel Borja-Villel, was born in Burriana (Spain) in 1957. He is director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. He was director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and previously of the Fondació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. He holds a BA in Art History from the University of Valencia, Spain, and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Something’s happened, an event shrouded in mystery: around midnight, a night like any other night, all Palestinians have disappeared, vanished into thin air. Nobody knows where drivers, farm labourer, doctors, nurses, elderly and young people have gone. What if there were no more Palestinians? What could happen to the Israelis? What could happen in everyone’s life if there was no more the enemy, the scapegoat, the alibi? The Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem presents one of the most groundbreaking novels of the Arab literary scene.

Ibtisam Azem, a Palestinian journalist and writer, has published two novels in Arabic: Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleeping Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014), both for Dar al-Jamal (Beirut, Baghdad and Freiberg am Neckar). The Book of Disappearance finally arrives in the Italian version. Born and raised in Taybeh, in the north of Jaffa, Ibtisam Azem has studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She works as a journalist in New York for the Arabic newspaper “al-Araby al-Jadeed” and as co-editor in chief of the “ezine Jadaliyya”.