Islam and Contemporary European Literature

Islam and Contemporary European Literature is timely and needed. I think that this is an excellent book. There is no other monograph which traces the interaction of Muslim and non-Muslim literary voices, in several languages over particular forms of imagination, through a focus on individual praxis of religion and the civilisational aspects of Islam. It is extraordinary to see how Dr. Kersten has constructed a macro-analytical project which denies easy generalisations and looks with nuance at specific texts and affective entanglements. -- Dilyana Mincheva, McMaster University
Exciting, intelligent, and learned, Carool Kersten’s timely study guides his readers through a fascinating constellation of writers, texts, and ideas drawn from all over Europe to explore the relationship between Islam and Contemporary Literature. He demonstrates the poverty of fixed ideas about closed identities –especially in relation to religion-- along with the beauty and urgency of reckoning with porous borders, liminalities, and heterotopias through literature. As barriers are erected all over the world and the drumbeats of war grow louder, we should all, despite Kersten’s modest closing sentence, read ‘a book like this.’ -- Ziad Elmarsafy, University of St Andrews