Antoon: Five Could’ve Been Fifty, Youssef: Fifty(-Nine) It Is!

Sinan Antoon responded to my book request just after I’d posted the list for Take the Arabic Lit Summer Reading Challenge, and Win. If you don’t know who Antoon is, for goodness sakes! His I’jaam was one of Katrina Weber’s choices.

He said, “So here are my five. But it could’ve been fifty of course:

1. Mahmoud Darwish, Fi Hadrat al-Ghiyab ( In the Presence of Absence) (or Memory for Forgetfulness)
2. Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt
3. Sonallah Ibrahim, The Committee
4. Elias Khoury, The Kingdom of Strangers
5. Hanan al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra“

Elias Muhanna, a PhD student in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University, a writer, and the maintainer of Qifa Nabki, also got back to me “better late than never.”

1. Al-Jahiz, The Book of Misers
2. The Mu`allaqaat in the Arberry translation
3. Night, Horses, and the Desert (not a single work, but an excellent anthology of classical Arabic literature by Robert Irwin)
4. Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima, in the Rosenthal translation
5. The Poems of al-Mutanabbi, also in the Arberry translation

And I finally got a file from Cairo book-shop/literary center proprietor Karam Youssef that my computer could understand. And Karam didn’t just choose 50…but 59!

Before you peruse Karam’s list, hop over to the reading challenge and enter your choice.