The holidays are coming, and I’m hoping you will give the gift of reading to both young adults and adults in your family.  If you are looking for nonfiction, I hope you’ll look at giving Saving Our Sons (2017) and The Minds of Girls (2018) and any of the other Gurian Institute titles that fit your family’s and school’s needs.  If you or someone you know is a fiction reader, I hope you’ll give The Blind Woman and Other Stories (Latah Books, 2018).  This book of stories was published in September.

I wrote the stories initially between 1987 and 2000 and have revised them over the last two decades.  The stories take place in the U.S., Turkey, Egypt, France, and Israel, all countries I have lived in or visited for prolonged periods of time.  Research in and from each of these locations was included in my initial gender research comparing play and learning patterns of boys and girls in various cultures.  While I was in these countries, I wrote not just nonfiction but stories about experiences there.

The Blind Woman is a powerful read not just for adults, I believe, but also for young adults.  One caveat:  there is a scene in a story that might be too graphic for a younger child, so if you purchase the book for young adults, please make sure to read the title story, The Blind Woman, yourself first.  Make sure the scene depicting an American nurse confronting female genital mutilation in her African patient is okay for your child to read.

Writing is a gift I hope to keep giving until I’m gone, and I hope you’ll give the gift of words, too.  Thank you for being a friend and fan all these years.  Here’s more about The Blind Woman and Other Stories.

–Michael Gurian

Critics Say

“(Gurian’s) skillful characterizations, convincing dialogue and rich details make this a worthwhile, entertaining collection.”

— Publisher’s Weekly

“Timely … a fascinating look into a world that remains impossibly foreign and opaque to most Americans.”

— Kirkus Reviews

Book Jacket Description

In this dramatic and profound collection of stories, New York Times bestselling author Michael Gurian explores the cultural and spiritual gulf between Muslims and Westerners.  From Ankara to Seattle, the West Bank to Manhattan, these provocative stories continually surprise with scenes of shocking brutality and improbable enlightenment.

In A Desperate Pride, a Palestinian woman falls in love with Raf Horowitz, an American Jew who arrives in Israel with reckless idealism.  In The Reincarnation of Donaldo Fuertes, an elderly Spanish-American writer recruits a young African-American Muslim to accompany him on a pilgrimage to his homeland.  And in the title story, a young hospice nurse in Seattle finds her life course completely changed as she fulfills her duties to a American-Somali woman scarred by her upbringing.

Written with the grace and craftsmanship of a veteran storyteller, Gurian’s collection is an emotional powerhouse filled with animosity and love, heartache and understanding, disillusionment and hope.  Lyrical and absorbing, these stories reveal the humanity of a culture so often in conflict with our own.

The Stories

In “The Blind Woman,” a young hospice nurse finds her life course completely changed as she fulfills her duties to an African Muslim family.

In “Necati Bey,” an American businessman in Turkey is mentored, then strangely rejected, by an elderly Turkish artisan.

In “A Desperate Pride,” a Palestinian woman falls in love with Raf Horowitz, an American Jew who left behind his life in America to make a perilous pilgrimage to Israel.

In “The Kapici’s Wife,” a Turkish diplomat, returning to Ankara after years in America, meets again a woman from his adolescence and realizes how removed he has become from his native culture.

In “Irina’s Lullaby,” a young Frenchwoman married to an Algerian tries to reconcile her passion for the future with her feelings for her past.

In “The Reincarnation of Donaldo Fuertes,” an elderly Spanish immigrant recruits a young African-American Muslim to accompany him on a pilgrimage to his homeland.

In “Civilizations are Islands,” a young girl, half-American, half-Egyptian, struggles with her sense of identity and self when she moves with her mother from India back to Egypt.

More Praise for the Book

“Translucent stories! Courageous! While the rest of the world is (at war) with the Muslims, David Gabriel is calling for something higher, better, the kind of peace that only a first-rate storyteller can imagine. Buy these stories! Read them! Read them again! Give them to your grandchildren, if you have them. If not, hold onto them until you do.”

— Jim Connor, Ph.D., author of Silent Fire

“We could not ask for a more important, true or better book about the ‘politics’ of our world and, far more important, about the truths hidden in the human soul than we find in Making Peace with the Muslims.”

— Terry Trueman, Prinz Honor Award Winner for Stuck in Neutral

“These stories immerse us in the mysteries that attract us to, and repel us from, foreign cultures. These are very important narratives for our time. In them, individuals of various ages, genders and faiths reveal how culture can save us or fail us, at times simultaneously. I saw these stories as a narrative bracelet which, once put on, cannot be turned away from. Their beauty and unsentimental power are stunning.”

— Michael B. Herzog, Ph.D., author of Troilus and Criseyde

Get the book on www.amazon.com or other outlets online and in bookstores.