Al-Multaqa Prize for the Short Story has announced its inaugural longlist, for collections published in 2015-2016: The new Kuwait-based prize is unusual in celebrating the overlooked short-story genre. As Jordanian short-story writer Hisham Bustani said a few years back, in… Read More ›
“This is a book about books, about conventions of writing, reading, bookmaking, cultural creation and crossings, bristling with puns and long digressions about the “oddities of language, including its rare words”—a preoccupation that makes Davies’ translation all the more remarkable as a work of literature and scholarship both.”
“Seven of the writers read in English and one in Arabic: Mishka Mourani, Jehan Bseiso, Reem Rashash Shaaban, Marina Chamma, Kathy Shalhoub, Doyle Avant, Mohamad Shami, and Rewa Zeinati.”
“I’ve found that I translate best when the “I” gets out of the way and simply allows the process to happen through me—this is particularly true of poetry.”
“Texas, Quartz notes, has one of the highest incarceration rates in the U.S., with .5% of the state’s population in prison.”
“You’re welcome, oppressed women everywhere.”
“As previously announced, Delos is not a Eurocentric publication.”
“For Anglophone fans, Blasim will be at the Ilkley Literature Festival on October 14 at 7:30 p.m. to talk about the forthcoming collection he’s edited, ‘Iraq + 100’.”
“There is no shortage of varieties of shame: of body, of one’s sexuality or lack of sexuality, of modest or immodest dress, of impoverished dress, of ugliness, of age, of illness, of disability, of vanity, of religion, of doubting one’s religion, of being complicit with the regime, of Syrianness, of having no ‘important’ family roots, of people who talk incessantly about their roots.”
A crowdsourced list of cult classics.
“A guiding thread came unexpectedly from my mother, who turned out to have had a Jewish childhood friend named Evelyn.”
