A new volume of aphoristic prose and philosophical poetry from Etel Adnan, whose work The New York Times recently described as the “meditative heir to Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Rilke’s Book of Hours and the verses of Sufi mysticism.” She writes: “Reality is messianic / apocalyptic / my soul is my terror.”

Etel Adnan’s novel “Paris, When It’s Naked amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French Capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of Sitt Marie-Rose, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indispensable book by an indispensable writer”—Morgan Gibson.

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. A classic of war literature, it won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege.

“A series of meditations following the sun, Seasons arrives in mesmerizing waves of observation and reflection. The blue depths of Adnan’s inquiry—into the nature of Being, Time, knowledge itself—crest moment upon moment of quiet revelation, as the passions of history, myth, today, and yesterday rage and subside beneath her watchful eye. ‘To think is not to contemplate, it’s to witness.’ So stanzas wash upon the page’s horizon, ever moving toward the mind’s encounters with the world. Intimate with ephemera, alert to what’s hidden, Seasons seeks the universe within and beyond the spirit’s changeable weather, finding everywhere its center.”—Megan Pruiett

“Written against the background of war at the turn of this century, this millennium—the Gulf War, the Lebanese civil war and the military occupations of that country, the author’s country of origin—these letters, Of Cities & Women, are in their turn now letters to cities and women—that we, that is, women and men alike, might eventually, before it is too late, ‘find the right geography for our revelations.'”—Barbara Harlow

Winner of the 2020 International Griffin Prize. On October 27, 2003, Etel Adnan received a postcard from poet Khaled Najar, whom she had met in the late seventies. Originally in French, the poems it sparked collapse time, then expand it. War and love intertwine with coffee and bombs, memory and the present, evoking life in non-linear time. Originally written in French, this translation by Sarah Riggs is the first in English.