The Latest

'A New Year in Gaza': By Ibrahim Nasrallah

‘A New Year in Gaza’: By Ibrahim Nasrallah

Gaza, Poetry /
The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza ...

Part Two, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’

Part Two, Emile Habiby's 'The Six-Day Sextet'
Fiction /
Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby's The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. The next installment is set to appear February 16, 2026 ...

An Apology to May Ziadeh

An Apology to May Ziadeh
A Young Woman's Musings, Nonfiction /
A letter from ArabLit editor Ibtihal Rida Mahmood to May Ziadeh (1886-1941) ...

Fiction

Part Two, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’

Part Two, Emile Habiby's 'The Six-Day Sextet'

Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. The next installment is set to appear February 16, 2026.

...

Part One, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’

Part One, Emile Habiby's 'The Six-Day Sextet'

Over the next six weeks, we will be publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. The next installment is set to appear February 9, 2026.

...

New Short Fiction from Kuwait: ‘The Phone Call’

New Short Fiction from Kuwait: 'The Phone Call'

In this short fiction from Kuwait, the central character and his author are in a standoff over a telephone call.

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Poetry

‘A New Year in Gaza’: By Ibrahim Nasrallah

'A New Year in Gaza': By Ibrahim Nasrallah

The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.

...

Three Poems by Nima Hasan

Three Poems by Nima Hasan

“Hold me before the game ends. / Like everything else, / grief needs time / to become a language.”

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New Poetry in Translation: ‘From a Country That Was’

New Poetry in Translation: 'From a Country That Was'

“The temperature dipped a little / but the country’s still burning—”

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Interviews

On Translating Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

On Translating Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Will Tamplin has devoted much of his work in translation to sharing the literary world of the exceptionally complex Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. In this interview, Tamplin explores his motivation behind this continuous dedication to Jabra’s work, as he dives into his experience translating The Other Rooms.

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Omani Literature and the Translator as Intruder 

Omani Literature and the Translator as Intruder 

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Zia Ahmed discuss approaching Arabic translation via English and Urdu, the layers of “outsider-ness” in translation, and the boom of narrative fiction in Oman.

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Sinan Antoon’s ‘Of Loss and Lavender’

Sinan Antoon's 'Of Loss and Lavender'

In this conversation over e-mail, Sinan Antoon talks about the novel, the fraught nature of collective memory, the process of self-translation, and the sort of “security checkpoints” a book must pass through in the process of translation.

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In Focus

From Gaza
Between Two Arabic Translators with Yasmeen Hanoosh
2024 Flash Fiction Finalists

From the archives

Another Road for Syrian Poetry

Another Road for Syrian Poetry

“The divide among poets has added a diaspora to the spatial diaspora, which scattered Syrians around the world.”

...

For Valentine’s Day: The Many Loves of Nizar Qabbani

For Valentine's Day: The Many Loves of Nizar Qabbani

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.
And I have needed, for ages
A woman to make me sad
A woman in whose arms I could weep
Like a sparrow,

...

The Story of a Poem: Refaat Alareer’s ‘If I Must Die’

The Story of a Poem: Refaat Alareer's 'If I Must Die'
By Salih J Altoma  “And in Gaza and the West Bank, a new generation of poets persists. The most famous, ...