Noël Carroll Humour: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press This pocket-sized paperback examines the leading theories of humor and the value and morality of different types with a focus on the incongruity theory. Carroll considers the relationship between emotion and cognition and considers the big question: What does humor tell us about human nature? Monica Cantieni The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons Donal McLaughlin, tr. Seagull Books Set against the 1970 Swiss Referendum on immigration, The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons follows a young immigrant girl as she acclimates to her new life with her adopted family. Brimming with fascinating and eccentric characters, comical situations, and an exceedingly original writing style, Cantieni’s deeply poignant work artfully and empathetically explores being different and the problems of integration. Nota Bene a polygamous marriage who finds her way from rural Bangladesh to the precarious shop floors of a garment factory in Dhaka and ultimately to uncertainty in North America. In “Just One of the Gang,” two teenage Bangladeshi American girls awkwardly soak in their newfound awareness of social class in an all-girls private high school in suburbia. “Waiting” is a gutwrenching account of eleven-year-old Hashem and his little sister’s gastronomical cravings and childhood aspirations as they tug their impoverished way through the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan. Ghuznavi’s self-taught literary style is devoid of complex literary jargon or unwanted references to popular culture. She lays out the text neatly and cleanly and in swift strokes. Her short fiction in both matter and style resembles the tender stories of legendary Indian novelist Anita Desai. Ghuznavi is undoubtedly a master of contrasting a character’s circumstances of gender, class, religion, linguistic background, and ethnicity in order to inform her readers of the deepening divides and fractured lives in the developing world. Fragments of Riversong is a critical and creative culmination of Farah Ghuznavi’s journalistic passage for over a decade. Shilpa Kameswaran New York Iman Humaydan. Other Lives. Michelle Hartman, tr. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2014. ISBN 9781566569620 Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer with two acclaimed novels to her credit, B as in Beirut and Wild Mulberries . Her third work constitutes a rewarding and cohesive fictionalized meditation on the nature of place, emigration, and memory. The first-person narrator, Myriam , is condemned by the bloodiness of recent Lebanese history to suffer a deracinated life of pain and loss. She and her family flee her home country for Australia to escape the civil war. Her lover, Georges, who has impregnated her—thus, in the world of the novel, necessitating an abortion because Myriam is “a good girl, from a good family, not a slut”— disappears on the very day of his attempted flight, perhaps the victim of murder preceded by torture. (The abortion, incidentally, renders Myriam infertile.) Her mother responds to the life around her by retreating into silence, and her father, a tiny piece of shrapnel lodged in his head, goes mad. Myriam herself will be constantly plagued by migraines. After this first uprooting, she moves to Kenya with her husband, whom she does not love, then flies to the Beirut she has not seen for years in an attempt to repossess the family house. (It is not without importance in this sometimes explicitly feminist novel that her status as heir, her brother having been killed, is seen as September–October 2014 • 77 reviews unnatural and resented.) Myriam is told that her time in Beirut need not be long, but bureaucratic complications extend it for months. In the course of her stay, she has an affair with a Lebanese American who is in the Middle East to find his “roots,” a task he fails to accomplish. In a letter to her oldest friend, now dying of cancer, Myriam wonders about the nature of fear. Moving to a new country does not kill it, for it has “already taken root inside of us.” Nor does emigration solve all problems: one’s new life can be disturbingly precarious, and the past one has tried to forget can suddenly and powerfully reappear. And if the old life is frightening, then the new one is not real. Myriam suffers “a permanent...