Paving the Sea

Satirist, linguist, professor, and novelist, Rashid El-Daif is one of the leading voices on the contemporary Arabic literature scene. He has published three collections of poetry and numerous novels that have been translated into more than fourteen languages. Described as the Arab world's answer to Umberto Eco, his works represent a painful break with grand ideologies and grapple with the collapse of the initial project of Arab modernity. El-Daif teaches creative writing at the American University of Beirut. Nicholas R. Lobo is a doctoral student in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He earned his master's in Islamic history at the University of Oxford and has worked for several years as an Arabic-English translator at the Arab Center in Doha, Qatar. Alfred J. Naddaff is a Knight-Hennessy scholar and PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford University. He earned his master's in Arabic language and Near Eastern studies at the American University of Beirut and writes for various news publications.

"This is a highly intuitive and brilliant depiction of the rise of national sentiment and the introduction of modern attitudes and practices into nineteenth-century Greater Syria." -Ken Seigneurie, coeditor of A Concise Companion to World Literature "Paving the Sea distills the late Ottoman intellectual zeitgeist in ways that historical and scholarly accounts cannot. The novel strikes a powerful chord by juxtaposing today's dystopian sociopolitical conditions with the utopian aspirations of intellectuals who saw themselves as architects of a new nation." -C. Ceyhun Arslan, Koc University