Approaches to Kurban Said's Ali and Nino

Approaches to Kurban Said's Ali and Nino
Author: Carl Niekerk
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1571139907

Essays showcasing the novel Ali and Nino as particularly topical for today's readers both in and out of the classroom, and providing a number of diverse approaches to it.

Ali and Nino

Ali and Nino
Author: Kurban Said
Publisher:
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2000
Genre: Azerbaijan
ISBN: 9780701169596

"Ali and Nino" is the epic novel of enduring romance in a time of war. It has been hailed as one of the most romantic epic novels of all time. Ali and Nino, two lovers from vastly different backgrounds, grow up together in carefree innocence in Baku on the Caspian Sea. Here, where Eastern and Occidental collide, they are inevitably drawn into the events of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Torn apart by the turmoil, Ali joins the defense of Azerbajan from the onslaught of the Red Army, and Nino flees to the safety of Paris with their child, not knowing whether they will ever see each other again. A sweeping tale, as romantic and gripping as "Gone with the Wind" or "Dr. Zhivago," it portrays, against a gloriously exotic backdrop, the enduring love between childhood friends divided by their separate cultures.

The Orientalist

The Orientalist
Author: Tom Reiss
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2006-03-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0812972767

A thrilling page-turner of epic proportions, Tom Reiss’s panoramic bestseller tells the true story of a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. Lev Nussimbaum escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan and, as “Essad Bey,” became a celebrated author with the enduring novel Ali and Nino as well as an adventurer, a real-life Indiana Jones with a fatal secret. Reiss pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal–and sometimes as heartbreaking–as his subject’s life.

Girl from the Golden Horn

Girl from the Golden Horn
Author: Kurban Said
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2005-07
Genre: German fiction
ISBN: 9780715634004

From the mysterious author of the international bestseller, Ali and Nino, soon to be the subject of a major biography, comes a novel of thwarted love, exile, and desire, never before published in the UK. The story of Kurban Said and the international bestseller Ali and Nino is one of the most beguiling literary mysteries of recent years. Equally beguiling is the existence of another novel - an insinuating and strikingly beautiful story set against the backdrop of Weimar Berlin. Kurban Said once again takes up the subject of a cross-cultural love story between Muslims and Christians in a spellbinding story that stretches from Istanbul to Weimar Berlin to Jazz Age New York City. The Girl From the Golden Horn is an elegant story of suspense that enthralls from the first page to the last.

Bread And Ashes

Bread And Ashes
Author: Tony Anderson
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2013-03-31
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1446426297

Tony Anderson set out in the summer of 1998 to walk through Georgia. He wanted particularly to visit the Georgian mountain tribes - Tush, Khevsurs, Ratchuelians and Svans - to discover if they shared a common mountain culture, and to test the old idea of the Caucasus as an impenetrable barrier from sea to sea. From Azerbaijan to Svaneti, Anderson found communities where the old customs and beliefs still triumphantly survive, despite years of Communist oppression and the terrible uncertainties since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout his journey Anderson refers back to many other visits to Georgia, to the politics of independence, to the war in Abkhazia and Ossetia, to the civil war and Shevardnadze's accession to power, to the history of these people at one of the great crossroads of the world. It remains an abiding mystery that Georgia has managed to survive at all, devastated time and again by the vagabond hordes from the steppes and torn between the mighty empires that struggled over it. But survive it has with a vibrant culture still intact and, in the mountains, still deeply connected to its ancient ways.

Along the Trenches

Along the Trenches
Author: Navid Kermani
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509535586

Between Germany and Russia is a region strewn with monuments to the horrors of war, genocide and disaster – the bloodlands where the murderous regimes of Hitler and Stalin unleashed the violence that scarred the twentieth century and shaped so much of the world we know today. In September 2016 the German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani set out to discover this land and to travel along the trenches that are now re-emerging in Europe, from his home in Cologne through eastern Germany to the Baltics, and from there south to the Caucasus and to Isfahan in Iran, the home of his parents. This beautifully written travel diary, enlivened by conversations with the people Kermani meets along the way, brings to life the tragic history of these troubled lands and shows how this history leaves its traces in the present. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with current affairs and with the events that have shaped, and continue to shape, the world in which we live today.

My Animal, My Self

My Animal, My Self
Author: Marta Williams
Publisher: New World Library
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1608681696

In this groundbreaking book, animal communicator Marta Williams brings into focus an unexamined dynamic in our relationships with our animals: the idea that our animals are often our mirrors. Deeply and inextricably connected to us on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, they can pick up and reflect back to us the issues and events of our lives. Through stories, exercises, and an extensive questionnaire, you will gain unique insight into the healing and teaching roles of your companion animals, both past and current, and the profound gifts they offer.

Post-cosmopolitan Cities

Post-cosmopolitan Cities
Author: Caroline Humphrey
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2012
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0857455109

Examining the way people imagine and interact in their cities, this book explores the post-cosmopolitan city. The contributors consider the effects of migration, national, and religious revivals (with their new aesthetic sensibilities), the dispositions of marginalized economic actors, and globalized tourism on urban sociality. The case studies here share the situation of having been incorporated in previous political regimes (imperial, colonial, socialist) that one way or another created their own kind of cosmopolitanism, and now these cities are experiencing the aftermath of these regimes while being exposed to new national politics and migratory flows of people. Caroline Humphrey is a Research Director in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal, and India. Her research interests include socialist and post-socialist society, religion, ritual, economy, history, and the contemporary transformations of cities. Vera Skvirskaja is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University. She has worked in arctic Siberia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Her recent research interests include urban cosmopolitanism, educational migration in Europe and coexistence in the post-Soviet city.

The Orientalist

The Orientalist
Author: Tom Reiss
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2010-02-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1407053825

The Orientalist unravels the mysterious life of a man born on the border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world. Tom Reiss first came across the man who called himself 'Kurban Said' when he went to the ex-USSR to research the oil business on the Caspian Sea, and discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the Second World War, Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. The novel's depiction of a lost cosmopolitan society is enthralling, but equally intriguing is the identity of the man who wrote it. Who was its supposed author? And why was he so forgotten that no one could agree on the simplest facts about him? For five years, Reiss tracked Lev Nussimbaum, alias Kurban Said, from a wealthy Jewish childhood in Baku, to a romantic adolescence in Persia on the run from the Bolsheviks, and an exile in Berlin as bestselling author and self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth-century - of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism.