The Sun on the Tongue (Performance Ideas) - Softcover

Adnan, Etel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555541658 ISBN 13: 9781555541651

Publisher: PAJ Publications, 2018

Synopsis

The fourth volume in PAJ’s Performance Ideas series, The Sun on the Tongue unfolds in an expanding universe of philosophical reflections on love, art, war, nature, and human existence. Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned Arab American writer and visual artist, crosses genres and continents and centuries in her literary texts, plays, poems, and art. Her plays At A Certain Hour of the Night, Crime of Honor and Tolerance are featured here, along with essays on Pina Bausch and Paul Klee, and an interview on her life and work. Her texts have been performed or adapted for theatre, opera, and radio in the U.S. and Europe. Robert Wilson invited her to write the French section of his multi-country opera, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, in 1984.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, Etel Adnan has received many awards for her more than fifteen books: France Pays-Arab Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, Arab American Book Award, California Book Award for Poetry, Small Press Traffic Lifetime Achievement Award, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Radius of Arab American Writers. The Etel Adnan Award for Women Playwrights was established by the Al-Medina Theatre of Beirut to support women writers in the Arab World. She was honored with France’s L’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts in 2014. Adnan’s paintings, drawings, fold-out books, ceramics, and tapestries are exhibited on several continents, with recent solo shows at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha); dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel); MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Etel Adnan is represented by Galerie Lelong, Paris and New York. She lives in Paris.

Review

"Her writing is as fiercely complex and political as her paintings are serenely spare and personal." (Kaelen Wilson-Goldie Frieze)

"Etel Adnan is a polymath. Her work crosses many dimensions: cartographies, drawings, films, notebooks, novels, paintings, plays, poems, political journalism, tapestries, teaching, and her most recent works, her sculptures. Adnan is one of the greatest artists of our time, and an inspiration to so many other artists." (Hans Ulrich Obrist)

"Adnan's work is the anti-Ozymandias―a corrective to exuberant art-world bling. There is none of the bravado or self-regarding mythologizing of other artists of her stature." (Negar Azimi Wall Street Journal Magazine)

"Arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today." (Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States)

"Etel Adnan is a world treasure whom more of the world needs to know. Her poetry, her visual art, her longstanding feminist vision―a philosophical poethics of rage transmuted into love and vice versa―is crucial to the kinds of creative generosity that must replace our geopolitical cordoning off of the disasters of 'others.'" (Joan Retallack)

"Etel Adnan is a remarkable visionary, poet, writer, philosopher, and painter. An intellectual mind who dares to dream. She takes us to worlds that are real and other worlds at the same time." (Robert Wilson)

"It must be evident to anyone even slightly aware of Etel Adnan's career that her work exhibits formidable intellectual and creative range. Adnan has refused to be bound by the constraints of nation, gender, genre, medium, or discipline, in order to venture into explorations of social, political, imagined, and aesthetic surfaces and sites. Over the years she has been saddened by the prevalence of suffering, and she has always been intolerant of stupidity. But at its core, her work is a manifestation of an enduring will to life and an impassioned capacity for joy." (Lyn Hejinian)

"Etel Adnan is a beacon of thought in a disrempt world. In her writing, I sense her hovering just beyond, in view but ungraspable, yet grounding me in ever changing realization: luminous company, trusted guide, necessary source of immediate information. Adnan is a visionary of the meteoric and diasporic. Oscillating between the ecstatic and the unbearable, she finds home in the evasive emplacements of each moment." (Charles Bernstein)

"With ever-increasing wisdom and clarity, Etel Adnan's work continues to illuminate the human condition. From the very distant past to the all-consuming present, she has found ways to condense intellect and emotion into surprising forms that enact the dance towards freedom." (Ammiel Alcalay)

"An iconic Lebanese-American cultural figure." (Nana Asfour Paris Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: PAJ Publications
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1555541658
• ISBN 13: 9781555541651
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 175
• Editor: Marranca Bonnie, Rucshkowski Klaudia