The Elsewhere: On Belonging at a Near Distance - Tapa dura

"A striking, original piece of work." - Rebecca L. Walkowitz, assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison"

The Elsewhere. Or, midbar - biblical Hebrew for both ""wilderness"" and ""speech."" A place of possession and dispossession, loss and nostalgia. But also a place that speaks. Ingeniously using a Talmudic interpretive formula about the disposition of boundaries, Newton explores narratives of ""place, flight, border, and beyond."" The writers of The Elsewhere are a disparate company of twentieth-century memoirists and fabulists from the Levant (Palestine/Israel, Egypt) and East Central Europe. Together, their texts - paired so as to speak to one another in mutually revelatory ways - narrate the paradox of the ""near distance.