Extract: "I was eighteen years of age when love opened my eyes with its magic rays and touched my spirit for the first time with its fiery fingers, and Selma Karamy was the first woman who awakened my spirit with her beauty and led me into the garden of high affection, where days pass like dreams and nights like weddings. Selma Karamy was the one who taught me to worship beauty by the example of her own beauty and revealed to me the secret of love by her affection; she was the one who first sang to me the poetry of real life." (The Broken Wings) The Broken Wings is a tale of tragic love, set in turn-of-the-century Beirut. The book highlights many of the social issues of the time in the Eastern Mediterranean, including religious corruption, the lack of rights of women, and the weighing up of wealth and happiness and is probably inspired from Gibran's own personal experiences. Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher. Regarded as a literary and political rebel, his romantic style was at the heart of the renaissance in modern Arabic literature. TABLE OF CONTENTS: - The Broken Wings or Al-Ajniha Al-Mutakassirah; - Sketches & Paintings of Kahlil Gibran - Inspirational Quotes