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“He stood bewildered at the crossroads, not knowing which way to take.” Classic short fiction about Arabs in early twentieth century Paris by Fouad Elshayeb.

It’s publication day for Mohammed Alyahyai’s The War, in Christiaan James’s translation. In this opening passage, Issa Saleh prepares for an evening gathering—only to find that something, or someone, has slipped out of reach.

At this point in ‘The Country Doctor’s Tale,’ the titular country doctor is returning from a house call when he suddenly discovers political posters everywhere, even on the walls of the clinic.

“sometimes my soul is wild, / an egret flying far / beyond the ocean’s edge, // and sometimes I curl up, / tender as an anemone when touched, / as salty and as damp.”

“It is the free bird.”

“Alone / on a balcony with no air / I suffocate, grow intoxicated / Coffee cups multiply / stained with lipstick, overflowing with disappointment / taking me to a fresh bout of insomnia / and thoughts, buried before they could ever see the light.”

This month, Hoopoe Fiction (an imprint of AUC Press) publishes Charles Akl’s debut novel Red Like Orange, which won a 2023 Sawiris Cultural Award. Now, three years later, Sarah Enany’s translation of this novel is available to a new readership.

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Sarah Enany talk about some of the particulars about translating for the stage and, particularly, for song.

In this conversation with acclaimed Egyptian novelist Mohamed Mansi Qandil, we discuss his latest novel to reach English, The Country Doctor’s Tale, the relationship between doctoring and writing, the novels that shaped him, and why he’d like to see The Country Doctor’s Tale as a film or TV series.

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