Master of the Eclipse [Paperback]

A collection of stories about displacement, love, loss, poetry and war, from the Lebanese poet and painter who has been called “arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab-American author writing today” (Melus).

The stories inMaster of the Eclipseare populated by filmmakers, poets, girls, professors, and prostitutes who live in Beirut, Paris, Sicily, California, Saddam’s Iraq, and New York. The world of these stories is ours, with the same occupations and wars—a “world that would be a cemetery” were it not also a place where taxis are “yellow flowers floating down the avenues.”

From the collection’s title story, a long meditation on history and war, power and poetry, to its concluding tale, a strangely quiet vision of a tree floating in a Damascus stream, Etel Adnan’s painterly vision, her cosmopolitan flexibility, and her philosophical bent are on full display. This is a woman, after all, trained in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley, who became a painter, and then a poet. Her voice comes to us as something the opposite of her title: She is a master of light and revelation, of language, variety, and color.Etel Adnan, a Lebanese-American poet, artist, and public intellectual, is the author of more than a dozen books. Her groundbreaking novelSitt Marie Roseis one of the defining narratives of the Lebanese Civil War. Precisely observed tales of love, loss, exile and other quotidian matters from Lebanese-American poet/novelist Adnan... [C]areful, impeccably chosen language. Discerns whole worlds in little slices of life. The dozen lyrically descriptive stories in this eclectic collection by Lebanese-born poet and novelist Adnan range over a startling period of time and place, from 1930s Beirut through early '60s San Francisco to the first Gulf War...wise, reflective...richly textured...these powerful emotional taleslÃl