Host Mitch Jeserich reads excerpts from Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh: A New Version.  Gilgamesh is considered the oldest epic in the world and a masterpiece of literature. 

Gilgamesh is the story of a historical king of Uruk in Babylonia, and his journey of self-discovery.  Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city and that wisdom can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned.

The post KPFA Special: Reading the Epic of Gilgamesh (Part II) appeared first on KPFA.

Host Mitch Jeserich reads excerpts from Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh: A New Version.

Gilgamesh is considered the oldest epic in the world and and a masterpieces of literature. It is the story of a historical king of Uruk in Babylonia, and his journey of self-discovery.  Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city and that wisdom can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned.

The post KPFA Special: Reading the Epic of Gilgamesh (Part I) appeared first on KPFA.

Guest:  Pat Thomas is a counterculture historian and archival music producer. He is the author of such books as Listen, Whitey!: The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975, Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary; and his latest Material Wealth: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg.

KPFA Special Combo $450. 

Includes:

“Allen Ginsberg Material Wealth” (Book and CD) by Pat Thomas Plus “Voices that Change the World” by the Pacifica Radio Archives. 

The post KPFA Special – Allen Ginsberg: The Great American Poet of the Twentieth Century appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Emily Wilson who is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania and translator of both The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Mitch Jeserich reads from Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad.

The post KPFA Special – Grief Turns to Rage: A Reading from The Iliad by Mitch Jeserich appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca.

Contains:

The Iliad is an epic poem that recounts the ten-year Trojan War and explores themes of pride, honor, and the human condition. Wilson’s Iliad gives us a complete Homer for our generation and the first ever English translation by a woman.

The Rubaiyat is a manuscript of Persian verses attributed to Omar Khayyam, a 12th-century Persian mathematician and philosopher. The book contains pithy observations on complex subjects such as love, death, and the existence of God and an afterlife.

The post KPFA Special – The Odyssey and The Iliad, Why these Epic Verses Still Matter Today appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Juan Cole is a public intellectual, prominent blogger and essayist, and the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian.

Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1131) was a Persian astronomer and mathematician born in Nishapur in northeastern Iran who lived and worked at the courts of the Seljuk dynasty. Modern scholars agree that there is very little (if any) of the collected work of poetry know as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that can be certainly attributed to the historical figure. A tradition of attribution grew up in the centuries after Khayyam’s death which culminated in Edward Fitzgerald’s translation in the 19th Century.

The post KPFA Special – The History Behind The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: William Dalrymple is the author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire.

The Anti-Colonial Pack $475

The post KPFA Special – The Corporate Origins of Colonialism: The East India Company appeared first on KPFA.

The post KPFA Special – The Life & Works of Frantz Fanon appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Ilan Pappe is the Director of the European Center of Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He has published many books on the Middle East and the Palestine Question including, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, Ten Myths about Israel, and  A History of Modern Palestine.

The post KPFA Special – Ilan Pappé on the History of the Palestinian Resistance appeared first on KPFA.