Peter Theroux – författare

In this provocative and incisive memoir, Peter Theroux reveals the Middle East only as a true insider can. Stationed as a journalist in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for most of his seven years in the region, Theroux explodes the romantic images of Arabia, but replaces them with the even more intriguing reality of fanatic Muslims, overwhelmingly rich and powerful royal families, and the vast gulf in understanding between Arabs and westerners.

At a time when it is America’s leading candidate for the star role of Armageddon, Los Angeles still reigns as the destination par excellence and de facto trendsetter for the United States. Despite its curse of ancient and modern-day plagues—what other city can claim the rights to earthquakes and smog as well as riots and gang warfare?—Los Angeles remains the mythical source for the blood flowing through the American heart: the "pot of gold" that lies on the other coast of the rainbow. In Translating LA, Peter Theroux leads us beyond the rainbow in an affectionate and anecdotal guide to the human centers of Los Angeles. By bringing LA's thousand-and-one ethnic enclaves together with its broad range of social classes, Theroux understands LA by stretching across its fault lines with results that are "surprising and illuminating" (LA Reader). With its genuine sensitivity towards past, present, and future, Translating LA searches the souls of Angelenos to deliver a remarkable commentary on America's most complex and diverse city.

The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, 1997In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as “the bowman of the glance.Helima, Awad’s wife, must deal with the reality of today’s Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, dominated by the Islam of their conquerors and ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile’s water. Left to tend Awad’s sick mother and his dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truths behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: “Time, you are a traitor—what have you done with my love?Through his characters’ pain and suffering, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail, with wit and a keen sense of history’s absurdities, the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned lives.