Master of the Eclipse

A collection of stories about displacement, love, loss, poetry and war, from the Lebanese poet and painter who has been called "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab-American author writing today" (Melus). The stories in Master of the Eclipse are populated by filmmakers, poets, girls, professors, and prostitutes who live in Beirut, Paris, Sicily, California, Saddam`s Iraq, and New York. The world of these stories is ours, with the same occupations and wars--a "world that would be a cemetery" were it not also a place where taxis are "yellow flowers floating down the avenues." From the collection`s title story, a long meditation on history and war, power and poetry, to its concluding tale, a strangely quiet vision of a tree floating in a Damascus stream, Etel Adnan`s painterly vision, her cosmopolitan flexibility, and her philosophical bent are on full display. This is a woman, after all, trained in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley, who became a painter, and then a poet. Her voice comes to us as something the opposite of her title: She is a master of light and revelation, of language, variety, and color.