The Latest

“The Mouse That Cheated Death” is a short story by Qatari writer Huda Al Naemi from her collection “Kaleela and Huda.”

This story comes from Hussein al-Abri’s latest collection, Time Slips Away in the Corner (2026).

Mostafa Khraïef (1910-1967) was a prominent Tunisian poet, writer, and journalist.

There are events around the world this September 25-27 celebrating the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, after the Arab World Institute and Centre Pompidou declared September 25 to be “Mahmoud Darwish Poetry Day.”

“I’m sitting alone in my room / my clothes scattered around me”

Nour Balousha wrote these two poems “after I stopped screaming, not because it ended, but because I grew too exhausted to keep screaming.”

Born in the mid-1980s, Ahmed Alhokail is among the most distinctive Saudi writers of his generation. In this exchange, he talks about placing the ordinary at the center of the story, classical Arabic narratives as a living model, Najdi oral storytelling and the uncanny, and the “global reader.”

“Music is one of the arts most connected to place, as it is a physical vibration in a space.”

The Book of Damascus, ed. Zaher Omareen, is a new anthology in their “Reading the City” series. Here, editor Zaher Omareen talks with Fifi Bat-hef about selecting ten stories to represent a city as complex and storied as Damascus.

“In her poetry world, the sun is red. The moon is purple. Snow is ubiquitous. Winter is eternal.”

” Jaziri wrote poetry with one set of alphabets which at that time were used in four languages: Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Sometimes, he used the four languages in one couplet. His poems are still recited and sung by Kurds. That coexistence of languages was quite natural, the alluring music was convincing, although I sometimes understood almost nothing.”