Nancy Roberts has often been described to as the "First Lady of American Folklore" and the title is well deserved. Throughout her decades-long career, Roberts documented supernatural experiences and interviewed hundreds of people about their recollections of encounters with the supernatural.This nationally renowned writer began her undertaking in this ghostly realm as a freelance writer for the Charlotte Observer. Encouraged by Carl Sandburg, who enjoyed her stories and ar...

The "First Lady of American Folklore" explores the supernatural side of the Civil War with chilling tales of spectral soldiers and haunted battlefields.Few events have sparked more legends and stories of the supernatural than America's Civil War. The accounts of gallantry and heroism have spread far and wide. Nancy Roberts grew up listening to her father's stories of the War Between the States and she trekked over many battle sites with him during her childhood.

Nancy Roberts has often been described to as the "First Lady of American Folklore" and the title is well deserved. Throughout her decades-long career, Roberts documented supernatural experiences and interviewed hundreds of people about their recollections of encounters with the supernatural.This nationally renowned writer began her undertaking in this ghostly realm as a freelance writer for the Charlotte Observer. Encouraged by Carl Sandburg, who enjoyed her stories and ar...

Seventeen tales of untamed spirits in the newly expanded edition of the Spur Award finalist from the "custodian of the twilight zone" ( Southern Living).In these seventeen ghostly tales—including five new stories—Roberts expertly guides readers through eerie encounters and harrowing hauntings across Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the Dakotas. Along the way her accounts intersect with the lives (and afterlives) of legenda...

Nancy Roberts has often been described to as the "First Lady of American Folklore" and the title is well deserved. Throughout her decades-long career, Roberts documented supernatural experiences and interviewed hundreds of people about their recollections of encounters with the supernatural.This nationally renowned writer began her undertaking in this ghostly realm as a freelance writer for the Charlotte Observer. Encouraged by Carl Sandburg, who enjoyed her stories and ar...

As the stepchild of a State Department employee, she should have led a charmed life in exotic locations in Europe and Asia, as well as the United States. But her family hid a dark secret -- one that would affect the lovely, talented young woman's ability to form meaningful relationships long after she entered adulthood. This beautifully written novel is loosely based on author Nancy Roberts' life, and explores the effects of abuse on her as a child, a woman, and the member of a family whos...

Ghada Samman’s most recent novel, Farewell, Damascus is set in early 1960’s Damascus – a city that now languishes in the grip of corruption and political oppression following the Baathist takeover in Syria.The book opens as Zain Khayyal, a university student and aspiring young writer, plots an early-morning escape from her house as her husband slumbers. Her mission: to get an illicit abortion, plans for which she’s divulged to no one, and to announce that she wants out of ...

From the author of Time of White Horses and The Lanterns of the King of GalileeTwin sisters Randa and Lamis live in the besieged Gaza Strip. Inseparable to the point that even their mother cannot tell them apart, they grow up surrounded by the random carnage that characterizes life under occupation.Randa, who wants to be a journalist, writes to record the devastation around her, taking pictures of martyred children. Meanwhile, their belove...

Ghada Samman’s first full-length novel, originally published in Arabic in 1974, is a creative and daring work prophetically depicting the social and political causes of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. The story opens in a taxi in which we meet the five central characters, each seeking something to give life meaning: security, fame, wealth, dignity, recognition, freedom from fear and from tradition-sanctioned, dehumanizing practices. Once they reach the capital city of Beirut, on which they...

Set in late nineteenth-century Benghazi, Najwa Bin Shatwan’s powerful novel tells the story of Atiqa, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master. We meet Atiqa as a grown woman, happily married with two children and working. When her cousin Ali unexpectedly enters her life, Atiqa learns the true identity of her parents, both long deceased, and slowly builds a friendship with Ali as they share stories of their past.We learn of Atiqa’s childhood, growing up in the "slave yard...

Winner of the 2012 Naguib Mahfouz Medal, this novel is set in an idyllic Egyptian village from the time it was discovered by Muhammad Ali's mission in the early nineteenth century to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, movingly intertwining events on the world scene with the life dramas of its protagonists. The story opens with the pivotal character, Mubarka Badr, now a grandmother and matriarch, wanting to dictate a letter to God for her grandson to send to the Almighty by email. We are then us...

Shada Mustafa is a Palestinian writer, born in 1995. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Geographical Development Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her debut novel Ma Taraktu Khalfi (Things I left Behind) was shortlisted for the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the category of Young Author. It was excerpted in Banipal 71 (Summer 2021), translated by Nancy Roberts. Nancy Roberts is a...