MSI Press Blog

  photo includes Princess Muna of Jordan (mother of King Abdullah) in the center and Dr. Betty Leaver, MSI Press editor, second from the right; others - members of a visiting delegation We are happy tp provide you with a taste of the Middle East. Each of the books below contains nuggets and insights that are hard to find elsewhere -- written by the residents of the Middle East. Follow the links to more information. Damascus amid the War by Muna Imady Written by popular author, Muna Imady, whose book, Syrian Folktales, has delighted an uncountable number of readers outside of Syria, Damascus amid the War tells the very human story of the devolution of a society. The book containts 29 pre-war poins, vibrant with imagery of daily life in a robust Damascus. The 100 war poems that follow show the devastating affect on the people who navigate a daily existence after war came. This is a posthumous publication, containing Muna’s very last works and an introduction by her mother, Elaine Imady,

  What is a book jewel? A sometimes-overlooked book with remarkable insight and potential significance. Each month, we share near-daily, or as often as possible, reviews of the monthly book jewel - short, succinct reviews that can be read in 1-2 minutes with links to the reviewer by reviewers whose words are worthy of being heard and whose opinions are worthy of being considered. Sometimes a couple of minutes contains more impressive thought than ten times that many. We will let you decide that. This month's book jewel is  Road to Damascus  by Elaine Imady. Description: Recommended by US Review of Books and First Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Awards legacy competition, Road to Damascus describes the Middle Eastern journey of an American who meets and falls in love with a Syrian when they are both attending school in New York. Giving up her country and her religion to follow her husband back to Syria, Elaine Imady has made a life that has successfully bridged two cultures and two con

  Muna Imady: February 18, 1962- April 23, 2016 ABOUT THE AUTHOR My daughter, Muna Imady, was born in Damascus and grew up in an American-Syrian bi-lingual family. She began writing at a very young age. As a little girl, Muna would say, “I am Muna Imady, a writer and a poet." When she first uttered these words, she was perhaps seven years old, and we would laugh. But as soon as she could write, a pen and pad were seldom out of her hand, and she filled page after page with her poems and stories. After graduation from Damascus University, Muna worked for several years for an oil company, then married Nizar Zikar who was studying for a PhD in France. The first years of her marriage were spent in France, in which time she got a Master’s from the Paris Sorbonne and her daughter Nour and her son Sammy were born. When Muna and Nizar came back to Damascus, Muna began writing Arabic stories for several popular children's magazines, and dozens of these stories were published. A

Veteran and award-winning author, Omar Imady, has done it again with a new book, Erasures . Literary Titan Gold Award Winner. 'An exceptional novel on par with previous dystopian classics written by Orwell and Huxley.' - Los Angeles Book Review The Year is 2049. Following a brutal seven-year war, Earth teeters on the brink of destruction. The World Congress is convened to identify the enemy: unpredictability. Deep in the subterranean corridors of Zone 4 Literature Hub, Head Archivist Ray Blankenship is tasked with digitizing humanity’s remaining books. In this new world, meticulously organized, monitored, and managed, Ray is restless. In the absence of chance, of mystery and miracles, meaning is missing. Amid the order, Ray’s shocking discovery of disappearing digital texts quickly plunges his department, his superiors, and the entire principle of predictability into uncertainty. Soon, whole books begin to vanish. But not just any books. Only religious ones. As the race to pres

  What is a book jewel? A sometimes-overlooked book with remarkable insight and potential significance. Each month, we share near-daily, or as often as possible, reviews of the monthly book jewel - short, succinct reviews that can be read in 1-2 minutes with links to the reviewer by reviewers whose words are worthy of being heard and whose opinions are worthy of being considered. Sometimes a couple of minutes contains more impressive thought than ten times that many. We will let you decide that. This month's book jewel is  Road to Damascus  by Elaine Imady. Description: Recommended by US Review of Books and First Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Awards legacy competition, Road to Damascus describes the Middle Eastern journey of an American who meets and falls in love with a Syrian when they are both attending school in New York. Giving up her country and her religion to follow her husband back to Syria, Elaine Imady has made a life that has successfully bridged two cultures and two con

  What is a book jewel? A sometimes-overlooked book with remarkable insight and potential significance. Each month, we share near-daily, or as often as possible, reviews of the monthly book jewel - short, succinct reviews that can be read in 1-2 minutes with links to the reviewer by reviewers whose words are worthy of being heard and whose opinions are worthy of being considered. Sometimes a couple of minutes contains more impressive thought than ten times that many. We will let you decide that. This month's book jewel is  Road to Damascus  by Elaine Imady. Description: Recommended by US Review of Books and First Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Awards legacy competition, Road to Damascus describes the Middle Eastern journey of an American who meets and falls in love with a Syrian when they are both attending school in New York. Giving up her country and her religion to follow her husband back to Syria, Elaine Imady has made a life that has successfully bridged two cultures and two con

We like to think that MSI Press is a family, but sometimes, we have families among our authors. One such family is the Imady family from Damascus, Syria. Elaine Imady, the mother, met her sweetheart in New York and moved with him to his home country of Syria, where she raised three bicultural children. Her love story is told in Road to Damascus . Read more about Elaine and her book HERE .     Muna Imady, the daughter, wrote a beloved and popular book,  Syrian Folktales . Not long after, she died following heart surgery, leaving a mostly finished, unpublished book, Damascus amid the War, due out in August 2020. Elaine and daughter #32, Sausan, put the finishing touches on the book, including a touching memorial to Muna that had been published in the  New York Times . Read more about Muna, her life, and her books  HERE . Dr. Omar Imady, the son, is a professor of political science who has written a number of fiction and non-fiction books about Syria, Middle Ea

  What is a book jewel? A sometimes-overlooked book with remarkable insight and potential significance. Each month, we share near-daily, or as often as possible, reviews of the monthly book jewel - short, succinct reviews that can be read in 1-2 minutes with links to the reviewer by reviewers whose words are worthy of being heard and whose opinions are worthy of being considered. Sometimes a couple of minutes contains more impressive thought than ten times that many. We will let you decide that. This month's book jewel is  Road to Damascus  by Elaine Imady. Description: Recommended by US Review of Books and First Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Awards legacy competition, Road to Damascus describes the Middle Eastern journey of an American who meets and falls in love with a Syrian when they are both attending school in New York. Giving up her country and her religion to follow her husband back to Syria, Elaine Imady has made a life that has successfully bridged two cultures and two con

  excerpt from Damascus amid the War (M. Imady) --              Commentary   In Muna Imady’s writing we witness a kind of devolution from poetry that was filled with vivid imagery and striking metaphors to that which was made to carry words of the brutality of war. Stripped of Muna’s imaginative, powerful, evocative language, her poetry becomes savagely direct, honest to the point of shocking readers with its transformation.   The world of Muna’s early poetry has become broken, brutalized, burned, and bombed. With it, Muna’s heart is broken; her imagination has been filled with what is dark and laden with grief. The simplicity of most of the war poems, when compared with those of her pre-war output give readers a stark reminder of the effects of war in ways that the news cannot. War breaks people and it transforms artistry into something it was never meant to be, painting a picture in words of the way the human spirit can be crushed, the way poetry becomes reportage. The poetry that h