The Latest

Haseeb Al-Zainy’s “The Blacklist” appears in the new anthology The Book of Damascus: A City in Short Fiction, out this month from Comma Press. 

“It was five o’clock in the morning. The station, faintly illuminated by dim lamps, lay beneath a murky canopy of locomotive smoke. Qasim stood beside the steps of one of the coaches, gazing at the station clock.”

This excerpt appeared in the FOOTBALL issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which you can still get in print and digital. 

This poem is from a forthcoming collection,  مصمم معارك, to be published by the General Egyptian Book Organization.

In memory of the July 2025 massacres in Sweida, Syria.

In celebration of the World Cup, a football chant from Egypt.

Editors of the anthology Palestine is Everywhere — Skye Arundhati Thomas, Edwin Nasr, and Gloria Habsburg — recently launched a new “Palestine is Everywhere” platform to host a series of monthly commissions, “creating an ongoing space to support and amplify the work of artists, writers, and practitioners from Palestine and the wider region.”

“Some classical poets feel that the popularity of colloquial writers has nothing to do with the quality of their work, but rather because they have chosen the easier path.”

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.

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

“My book really is an examination of how he participated in the coup ,and how he believed fundamentally that the Free Officers were going to install democracy, and—once he realized that they were actually installing military dictatorship—the way he dissented, in the editorials and in person, the way that he was jailed, and the way he turned to fiction to express his dissent directly to Nasser.”