The Latest

In this excerpt from Sahar Khalifeh’s ‘A Novel for My Story,’ by turns playful and serious, the novelist describes the moment she freed herself from her marriage and other people’s expectations of what her life could be.

“Ah, how immense my delight when I saw the moving cart piled high with carpets, lamps, and sacks of every size and color!”

The novel poses a question about identity: Is it a piece of paper, or a sense of belonging?

“I pace this room alone, / fingertips brushing the wall, / memorizing each mark, each echo.”

“Once, I became / A cloud / To gain / Flight experience / And twice / I became / A brick / To gain / Experience in falling.”

“sometimes my soul is wild, / an egret flying far / beyond the ocean’s edge, // and sometimes I curl up, / tender as an anemone when touched, / as salty and as damp.”

Here, Leri Price talks about the referred trauma (and guilt) of translating testimonies from a genocide, how she worked with translators bringing the book into other languages, and the particular challenges of translating this book.

Today, Kawthar al-Jahmi talks about her writing and reading journeys, the role of literary prizes, submitting her novel to the publisher a day before giving birth, and developing a writing practice while working and raising children.

This month, Hoopoe Fiction (an imprint of AUC Press) publishes Charles Akl’s debut novel Red Like Orange, which won a 2023 Sawiris Cultural Award. Now, three years later, Sarah Enany’s translation of this novel is available to a new readership.

“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”