Ruth WALTON

An educational resource to help children explore the issue of fair trade by allowing them to see through the eyes of the children of banana farmers in the Windward Islands. The author spent time with the farmers’ families and she uses the real-life narratives of two young children going about their daily activities to show how bananas grow, problems such as hurricanes which can affect the crop, how they are picked and transported and how they end up in our stores.

The main story is illustrated with colorful collages made from painted textures and photographs from the Islands. Interspersed in the story are boxes with maps, facts and photos giving more detail on the places and methods and challenges. Its ends with banana recipes and ’bigger picture’ descriptions, maps and photos of where bananas come from and examples of social premium funded projects.

With plenty of points for discussion Juliana’s Bananas will give girls and boys an insight into the lives of children like them in the Caribbean and how fair trade premiums help communities all over the world build better living conditions.

Ruth WALTON is skilled in many areas of book design, including illustration, layout and typography. She produces educational books using a combination of letterpress, illustration, collage and photography. She illustrated the « Let’s Find Out series » for Franklin WATTS.

September 2014 - pages : 32 - 212 x 178 mm (landscape) - price : £8.99 / £9.95 - ISBN : 978-1-78026-1-805 (eBook ISBN : 978-1-78026-181-2)

Richard SWIFT

An investigation of the alternatives to capitalism, including socialism, anarchism and deep ecology.

Financial collapse and crisis ; disgust at bankers’ greed ; the devastating effects of yawning inequality : all these and more have led to widespread dissatisfaction and disenchantment with capitalism. people are crying out for an alternative but are continually told that one does not exist.

Richard SWIFT proves this to be wrong with style and assurance. With capitalism vulnerable and out-of-step in the wake of financial crises this book investigates the alternatives that are on offer - including socialism, social democracy, anarchism, ecology and degrowth.

Combining the practical with the visionary, he shows that finding alternatives to capitalism is no longer an academic issue for the left – it is an urgent planetary necessity.

Richard SWIFT is a former editor of New Internationalist magazine and author of the « No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy ». In 2011 he won the Daniel Singer Millenium Prize for an original essay which helps further socialist ideas.

April 2014 - pages : 208 - 216 x 138 mm (paperback) - price : £9.99 / $16.95 - ISBN : 9781780261706 (eBook ISBN : 978-1-78026-171-3)

Peter HUDSON

The author has been visiting the same village in Mauritania on the remote edge of the Sahara for over twenty years. This is the story of his most recent journey there – an intense and engaging day-by-day account through which global change and inequality are made human.

The Sahel – the ‘shore’ of the Sahara – is where cultures, customs and climates meet, merge and clash. Through the numerous characters we meet and from the obviously deep and sympathetic nature of the relationship the author has with the local people, with whom he now runs agricultural projects, we learn of the realities of life in one of the harshest, most marginalised and but also quietly inspiring corners of the world.

Searingly honest and refreshing, this is a superbly written piece of travel writing about a little-known part of the world. The author gets under the surface and gives a sensitive account of what life is like. He understands not just the culture and complex social dealings but also how economics and geo-political forces that can profoundly affect the lives of individuals in a remote community.

Illustrated with maps and line drawings « Under An African Sky » is a unique journey – for the armchair traveller and those interested in development, climate change and global politics and economics.

Peter HUDSON runs an international development charity based in Mauritania in West Africa. He has travelled widely in the region and has written several books including « Leaf in the Wind », « Travels in Mauritania » and « Two Rivers ».

September 2014 - pages : 240 - 216 x 138 mm (paperback) - price : £9.99 / $16.95 - ISBN : 978-1-78026-178-2 (eBook ISBN : 978-1-78026-179-9)

Kenza SEFRIOUI

« Une étude pionnière consacrée à une revue maghrébine » [Salim Jay] qui questionne une période essentielle de l’histoire du Maroc.

Créée à Rabat en mars 1966 par un petit groupe de jeunes poètes d’expression française, Souffles a été, tout au long de ses sept années d’existence, une tribune singulière dans le paysage de la presse marocaine, en évoluant du laboratoire d’écriture, où les lecteurs découvrirent notamment Tahar Ben Jelloun ou Mohammed Khaïr- Eddine, à l’engagement culturel et politique.
Avec son projet de restructuration de la culture nationale, elle a porté un véritable mouvement littéraire et intellectuel, avant de devenir la tribune du mouvement marxiste-léniniste. Disparue en 1972, après l’arrestation d’Abdellatif Laâbi et d’Abraham Serfati, son histoire, retracée au travers des textes et des témoignages de ses contributeurs, montre que sa vision moderniste et progressiste invitait à des questionnements toujours d’actualité.

4è de couverture (extrait)
… cette revue, qui aurait pu vivre la vie tranquille d’un cénacle de poètes et d’artistes… a réussi, elle, en une série d’avancées de la conscience, à opérer deux ruptures essentielles : l’une dans le champ culturel et esthétique, l’autre dans le champ politique… »
Abdellatif Laâbi (Extrait de la préface)

Kenza SEFRIOUI, née à Paris en 1979, est journaliste et critique littéraire. Responsable pendant cinq ans de la rubrique littéraire du magazine marocain Le Journal hebdomadaire, elle collabore aujourd’hui notamment au site des cultures méditerranéennes Babelmed, et milite pour le développement culturel au Maroc.
De sa thèse de doctorat en littérature comparée consacrée à Souffles, elle donne aujourd’hui une étude rigoureuse en même temps qu’un récit passionnant qui plonge le lecteur au cœur de la revue et de ses engagements « ardents ».

Mars 2013 - 458 pages - 15 x 22 cm - broché - 90 MAD - ISBN : 978-9954-9187-0-8
Essai

Textes recueillis à Marrakech et traduits par Doctoresse LÉGEY

« J’ai recueilli tous ces contes à Marrakech. Plus heureuse que nombre de folkloristes qui ont dû s’adresser à des intermédiaires, j’ai fait ma récolte directement dans les principaux harems de Marrakech, sur la place de Jâma ‘el-Fna ‘, auprès des conteurs publics ou dans mon cabinet, où venaient s’asseoir et causer Si El-Hasan ou Lalla ‘Abbouch.
Je transcrivais ces contes en français, au fur et à mesure qu’ils m’étaient
contés et, ensuite, pour être bien sûre de n’avoir fait aucune erreur d’interprétation, oublié aucune expression particulière, je les redisais à mon tour en arabe à mes conteurs. Je puis donc affirmer que la version que je donne est aussi près que possible du conte entendu. »
D. LÉGEY (extrait de la 4^e de couverture)

M^me LÉGEY, médecin au Maroc à partir de 1910 et pendant plus de 25 ans, y a soigné des milliers de personnes et contribué à installer des dispensaires et maternités dans plusieurs villes du pays. Par sa collecte de contes et légendes, aux sources les plus authentiques, leur traduction et leur publication, elle permet aux francophones d’accéder à l’imaginaire d’un peuple.
« Apprentie folkloriste », comme elle se définissait elle-même, M^me Légey participe aussi à la préservation d’un riche patrimoine. (En 2001, l’espace culturel de la place Jemaa el-Fna de Marrakech a été proclamé par l’UNESCO : chef-d’œuvre du patrimoine oral et immatériel de l’humanité.)

Parution Maroc : novembre 2007 ; 2è tirage : janvier 2010 - réédition, édition originale 1926 - 368 pages - 13,5 x 21 cm - 18 € - ISBN : 978-9954-8851-0-2

Hanane OULAÏLLAH JAZOUANI (texte et illustrations)

À vous de voter les enfants !
À Fanidi, petit village du Maroc, une élection est organisée pour choisir le maire junior. Pour qui voteras-tu ?

Collection « p’tit citoyen (… deviendra grand !) »
Une collection qui propose aux enfants de réfléchir à la vie ensemble, de se préparer à devenir un citoyen responsable : se préoccuper, se comporter et agir selon l’intérêt commun.
Des messages essentiels, la notion de citoyenneté, ses enjeux, au travers d’histoires et d’activités qui font, doucement et joliment, grandir.
Des livres gaiement illustrés pour que lire et réfléchir riment aussi avec plaisir !

Hanane OULAÏLLAH JAZOUANI est une jeune auteur et illustratrice franco-marocaine, née en Normandie après que ses parents aient quitté le Maroc dans les années 1970 pour commencer une nouvelle vie en France. Après des études artistiques en Grande-Bretagne, Hanane décide de s’installer à Casablanca. Elle y travaille comme journaliste et crée les personnages des Mounikettes, exposés dans plusieurs villes du Maroc ainsi qu’en France, et également publiés dans la presse marocaine. En 2011, elle a remporté le 1^er prix du concours littéraire « Une mer de mots ».

32 pages - 17 illustrations, dont une à colorier - 60 MAD - ISBN : 978-9954-494-12-7
Disponible en français et en arabe - à partir de 7 ans

Karen LAZAR

“Home is as old as one’s skin but as elusive as an object seen through the wrong end of a telescope.” It is this sense of a view, skewed, intangible, which echoes throughout Karen Lazar’s Hemispheres. Waking in hospital after a post-operative stroke, she finds one side of her body paralysed and her world knocked out of kilter. Spatial, perceptual and subjective changes force her to view her new life in facets. The fragmented view is made apparent by means of a triptych of clusters which charts Karen’s experience from Metamorphosis, through Rehabilitation and Adaptation. Quietly reflective, deeply lyrical, Hemispheres is concerned with returning separated parts into a whole and coming home to the self.

Praise from Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature, Wits University :
“ ‘A stroke on one hemisphere of the brain crosses over to manifest … on the opposite side of the body’.

What does it mean to find oneself suddenly living at this lethal crossing ? This exquisite book illuminates how to live with and beyond loss. A superb filigree of acute and finely-crafted pieces, Hemispheres narrates the journey of re-composing life, joy and love from the ‘foreign citadel’ of a body made alien through stroke.

Wry, ironic, comic, joyous, desolate, celebratory, surreal, this mosaic of feeling reconfigures love from loss ; each subtle fragment a tessera against time.

As the pieces delve deep into the self, they reach beyond it. The rehabilitation hospital reeks of personal loss even as it becomes a microcosm of contemporary South Africa. Broken bodies deformed by carnage and violence accumulate in the ward. The medical hierarchy enacts deep-seated forms of South African authoritarianism, the losses of the past inflicted and self-inflicted in petty and cruel ways.

The book becomes a quiet odyssey of affirming life in the face of death. The pieces themselves, weightless and profound, light and dark, half and whole, mirror the contradictions of wrenching life from loss.”

Praise from Joanne Fedler :
“A collection of rare/nuanced and tender insights. Lazar takes us into the gyre of re-orientation post-stroke, sharing what is lost and what is claimed when what you’ve always been and known, changes. A book that pulses with quiet courage and celebrates it in others.”

Karen LAZAR is an English educator at the Wits School of Education. Her MA and Phd, both from Wits, are in South African gender studies. This is Karen’s first volume of (first person) creative nonfiction. Karen had a stroke in 2001, from which she has partially recovered. She lives in Johannesburg.

Publication date : May 2011 - 88 pages - format:136 x 210 mm - price : R145 - ISBN : 978-1-920397-24-1

Jennifer THORPE (author and editor) - the contributors include : Jen THORPE, Karabo KGOLENG (well known radio and media personality), Sarah BRITTEN, and Dorothy BLACK, as well as many other women.

Do you remember your first time ?
As women, we all have a story within us about a sexual experience that was unforgettable. Perhaps it was incredible, earth shattering, life-changing, and wonderful. Perhaps it wasn’t romantic or pleasurable, but awkward, painful or forced upon us. Many of us have kept our experiences secret because, by exposing our stories, we expose ourselves and our feelings around sex.

In My First Time, Southern African women have shared their stories about their significant first time experiences of sex and sexuality. This is a collection of honest, powerful, and brave accounts. Some joyful, others funny and some heartbreaking, but all of them important for women, and hopefully men, to read.

This is the perfect book for you to read to reflect on your own first times. This is the perfect book to share with your mother, siblings, and friends.

Jennifer THORPE is a feminist writer. She’s passionate about sharing women’s stories and women’s writing. She is the creator and curator of stories for the My First Time project and the editor of FeministsSA.com. Jennifer has an MA in Politics from Rhodes University and is studying towards an MA in Creative Writing at UCT. She lives in Cape Town with her boyfriend Mike and her two cats.

Publication date : September 2012 - 174 pages - format : 136 X 210 mm - price : R160 - ISBN : 978-1-920590048

Yewande OMOTOSO

Praise for Bom Boy from Nuruddin Farah, author of Links, Knots & Crossbones :
"This is a novel bursting with elegance, written by a young author
brimming with genuine promise. Yewande Omotoso is a stylist with a
literary vision."

Praise for Bom Boy from Joanne Hichens, author of Divine Justice :
’Bom Boy surprises and delights, sings at turns, as it straddles the past and the present, bringing into focus cultural beliefs while examining the intimacies and complexities of bonds of family and friendship. What strikes me most is the originality. This fine debut, firmly rooted in contemporary consciousness, is story-telling of note which whets the appetite for more.’

Leke is a troubled young man living in the suburbs of Cape Town. He develops strange habits of stalking people, stealing small objects and going from doctor to doctor in search of companionship rather than cure. Through a series of letters written to him by his Nigerian father whom he has never met, Leke learns about a family curse ; a curse which his father had unsuccessfully tried to remove. Bom Boy is a well-crafted and complex narrative written with a sensitive understanding of both the smallness and magnitude of a single life.

Yewande OMOTOSO was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria with her Nigerian father, West Indian mother and two older brothers. She and her family moved to South Africa in 1992 and have lived there ever since. She is an architect ; space and buildings being a passion of hers second only to words and literature. She currently lives in Cape Town working as a designer, freelance writer and novelist.

Publication date : September 2011 - 272 pages - format : 135 X 210 mm - price : R180 - ISBN : 978-1-920397-35-7

Kouméalo ANATE ; préface Tanella BONI

Tchotcho EKUE ; Kokou TONGNEVI

Edem KODJO

Rafael Echeverría

Marx sostuvo que, a diferencia del socialismo utópico del pasado y de varias propuestas socialistas y anarquistas de su época, su contribución se caracterizaba por ser científica. Su aporte teórico cruzaba del pantanoso terreno doctrinario al territorio firme de la ciencia. El pensamiento marxiano, proclamaba el mismo Marx, tenía estatus científico. Ese era, según él, su rasgo distintivo fundamental. Ese mismo rasgo fue posteriormente uno de los grandes atractivos que para muchos teóricos parecía ofrecer el marxismo. Sin embargo, en aras del rigor, cabe preguntarse : ¿Cuáles son los criterios de cientificidad en los que se sustenta esta afirmación ? ¿Cuál es el concepto de ciencia que propone Marx ? ¿Se ciñe su contribución a dicho concepto ?

Los ensayos reunidos en este libro, que pretenden dar respuesta a estos interrogantes cruciales, forman parte de la investigación que Echeverría realizara a fines de la década de los setenta y que sirvió de base para su tesis doctoral en la Universidad de Londres. Hoy, por primera vez, son presentados en un mismo volumen. Las conclusiones a las que arriba el autor no dejarán de sorprendernos y difícilmente nos dejarán indiferentes. Esperamos que sean capaces de suscitar reacciones y debates, de manera de avanzar en una evaluación que permita situar la obra del gran pensador que fue Marx en un lugar apropiado, más allá de la idolatría o de la demonización.

310 páginas - 22,50 dólares - ISBN : 9789563060843

Francisco Varela

« Lo que he querido desarrollar en estos ensayos es una comprensión del fenómeno de la vida en toda su gloria y majestad. Esto quiere decir evitar caer en la tentación dominante de partir del universo impersonal y muerto de la física para luego verse forzado, casi a contrapelo, a rescatar de ahí lo vivo, cuya especificidad es lo individual creador de significado. Gran parte de la ideas que aquí presento son precisamente el esfuerzo por romper ese sueño newtoniano, y por recentrar el fenómeno de la vida sobre sus propias bases, es decir, no como evento improbable que escapa a la muerte física, sino como ocurrencia central de la naturaleza que funda todo conocer y, en particular, el conocimiento del mundo físico. La conclusión a la que estos ensayos apuntan es que lo central es una circularidad inalienable entre el acto de conocer y vivir, entre el universo de lo vivo y el conocer como objeto de estudio. Dicho de otra manera, el fenómeno de la vida, como un todo, quiere decir, precisamente, que el acto de vivir precede a la explicación del origen de la vida sobre la Tierra. Que el conocer precede a la comprensión del conocer visto como mecanismo biológico y neuronal. Que la experiencia vivida es la base misma de la exploración científica de la conciencia. »

474 páginas - 31,75 dolares - ISBN : 9789563060812

Cristián Reyes

El proyecto denominado “Herramientas para la Formación de Profesores de Matemáticas”, tiene como objetivo contribuir al mejoramiento de la calidad de la formación pedagógica y disciplinaria de los estudiantes de pedagogía en matemática, a través de la incorporación de una Metodología de Estudio de Casos y el desarrollo de una colección de Monografías de contenidos matemáticos.

243 páginas - 25,02 dolares - ISBN : 9789563060782

Samad BEHRANGI - Translated to German by B. BINIAZ

Asad SEIF

Asaf SEIF (born in 1957 in Bandar Anzali) is an Iranian writer and researcher. He has been living in Europe since 1984 and is engaged in literary and cultural activities. He is a member of Iranian writers in exile association and was a member of its board of editors for one term. He has published numerous articles and studies in the field of social analysis and literary criticism. His latest study on “Love in fiction by Iranian writers in exile” is published by Forough Publications.

14 euros - ISBN : 978-3-943147-10-0

Aramesh DOSTDAR

Aramesh DOSTDAR (born in 1932 in Tehran) is an Iranian philosopher, writer, scholar and a former philosophy lecturer at Tehran University. He moved to Germany in 1958 to study philosophy in University of Bonn. From 1973 to 1980 he taught philosophy in the University of Tehran, until his dissmision during closure of universities by the Islamic government in the so called Cultural Revolution. Aramesh Dustdar who is currently living in Germany, is probably one of the few Iranian philosophers in the western meaning of the word. He is known for both complexity of the language but clarity and precision of ideas expressed. .
Four of his books have been published in Persian, 2 of them “Dark Luminosities” and “The Hidden Kinship” by Forough Publications.
He is uncompromising on controversial and sensitive issues such as incompatibility between Islam and democracy or the situation of intellectuals in the Muslim world, as, in his view, a real, Western type intellectual can not be tolerated in any Muslim society.
The murders of political and intellectual dissidents and opponents in the Islamic Republic of Iran are a « brilliant » example of that antagonism between Islam and democracy, he points out.

443 pages - 22 euros - ISBN : 978-3-943147-09-4

Michael SOMMER
Translated from German by D^r. Nabil Al Haffar

In this brief research, ancient civilization scholar Michel Sommer provides an exemplary model of a study in the science of history, which assimilated Assmann’s ideas about the theoretical field productively. Concerning the civilizational history of the region extending between the Mediterranean and the Tigris River, in the late Greek and Greek times, it is a sensitive and controversial research in fact, not because it explores the historical roots of the civilization region, which the Romans called Syria - and it is today implicitly and brutally involved in gang and proxy wars, in a form of « third world war », according to the diagnosis of many observers - but because in his analysis of social models and religious systems in the late Greek and Greek era, he paints a new, humanistic picture of the different cultures of the empire and their intellectual status.
Michael Sommer has succeeded, by being realistic and exciting at the same time, in shedding lights on the past that shows every concrete detail as part of a tangled relationship, as it opens up horizons, that questions and doubts current “clichés” !

2020 - 224 pages - ISBN : 978- 9953 -583 -93-8

Boutros AL MAARI

This book offers pleasure to the eye as well as to the mind of the reader. Neither the texts are the basis for it nor the drawings, but rather they complement each other to produce an art book that we rarely find in our libraries. Al-Maari tries to be as simple as his paintings, simple in his texts and ideas that he calls stories and that are not without a poetic whiff or literary value. Damascus also is strongly present in his texts and he is not apologetic in showing his longing to his mother-city, so he celebrates it from a distance as if he is still walking in its streets and alleys like any young lover.
Through this book, Al-Maari tries to attract the ordinary audience - as he calls it – and lead them through the door of reading and savoring art from his simple yet sophisticated way of drawing and writing.
We hope that this experience will be a motivation for similar works by our writers and young artists, enriching our Arabic library.

2018 - 88 pages - ISBN : 978-9933-9242-6-3
Arabic

DOSTOEVKY
Translated from Russian by Adnan Jamous

Sheikh Hamad award for translation and international understanding for the achievement in Russian – Arabic translation
Doha – Qatar - 2018

This book includes a summary of rich experience, acquired by a creative person during his lifetime, with all the harsh tribulations and violent clashes, shameful slips, noble stances, and impressive creative achievements.
The writer monitored all the subtle aspects of the development of the « living life » and followed very carefully the reflection of its manifestations in the Russian and foreign press. Eyewitnesses state : that the writer used to review newspapers and magazines daily « until the last column of them », and was keen to capture through the great diversity of important and secondary facts, its internal unity, its socio-psychological foundations, its spiritual-moral essence, and its philosophical-historical significance. It is interesting that some contemporary Russian intellectuals of Dostoyevsky considered that his genius was more evident in his « diaries » than in his « creative works ».
What gives this volume its added value, is that it is the first time that Dostoevsky is translated directly from Russian to Arabic.

2017 - 688 pages - ISBN : 978-9933-9242-1-8
Arabic