An Apology to May Ziadeh
Three Arabic Titles Among New ‘PEN Translates’ Winners
Three Poems by Nima Hasan
Fiction
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’
In this short fiction from Kuwait, the central character and his author are in a standoff over a telephone call.
Classic Short Fiction: Mohammed Hussein Heikal’s ‘The Second Family’
Short fiction by Mohammed Hussein Heikal (1888 – 1956) about marriage and money in early twentieth century Egypt.
Poetry
Three Poems by Nima Hasan
“Hold me before the game ends. / Like everything else, / grief needs time / to become a language.”
‘What have I survived’: New Poetry by Mahmoud Alshaer
“I survived—came out of yesterday / alive, carried out on the shoulders / of the wind.”
Interviews
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.
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.
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.
In Focus
From the archives
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,
Safia Ketou: The First Algerian Sci-fi Novelist of Post-independence Algeria
Samer Abu Hawwash’s ‘It No Longer Matters If Anyone Loves Us’
