IMAGINING MIDDLE EAST

Winner of the 1992 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation.

The Mediterranean East has long been our closest and most contrasted alternative - the consummate other. It is contiguous both in geography and imagination. Alternatively mysterious, menacing, enticing or repulsive; at once deserted and swarming, barbaric and refined; sometimes violent; sometimes indolent; a place of enchantment, escape, or exasperation – but always present and always other.

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