Book Size: 5.25" x 8"

Pages: 160

Format: Hardback & Paperback

ISBN: 9781566561037 HB
ISBN: 9781566561068 PB

Imprint: Interlink Books

Edition: 1

Categories: ,

Prairies of Fever

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Paperback $ 9.95 | Hardback $ 22.95

“[This work] unambiguously and courageously affirms the creative powers of the mind.” — World Literature Today

About this book

Prairies of Fever is one of the foremost modernist novels of our time.

A negation of chronology and sequence, a cohesve relationship between form and content, and a temporal parallelism of events, memories and dreams, give the novel a unique tenor. The central character, Muhammad Hammad, is a young teacher hired, like hundreds of others from all over the Arab world, to teach in a remote part of the Arabian peninsula. The novel recounts his harrowing struggle to retain any sense of identity at all in the bleak and alienating place he finds himself in, caught between the infinite expanse of desert and the intolerable narrowness of village life. His psychic and physical anguish, beset as he is by hallucinations, fantasies and the indifference of the villagers, is mirrored in the writing of the novel: time appears unfixed as the story jumps from past to future and back to the present; there is an eerie fusion of the animal and human worlds; and reality and fantasy become hard to distinguish.

The result is an exceptional poetic novel, disturbing, evocative and deeply moving.

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About the author

Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Palestinian poet and novelist living in Amman, Jordan. He has published several novels and collections of poetry to date, and has won great acclaim throughout the Arab world.

Reviews

“A milestone in postmodern Arabic literature; recommended…” — Library Journal

“[This work] unambiguously and courageously affirms the creative powers of the mind.” — World Literature Today

“An accomplished first novel…” — Kirkus Reviews

“Nasrallah…makes existentialism deeply political and very disturbing.” — Guardian, Matt Rees’s Top 10 novels set in the Arab world

“It should be read for its fearless vision, its concern with the mind in isolation, and for its absolute trust that poetry alters the world.” — Jeremy Reed