Latest Issue of ‘International Gallerie’ Magazine Focuses on Palestinian Culture

Susannah Tarbush, over at Tanjara, notes that the latest issue of International Gallerie, “an award-winning global arts and ideas journal published from India.”

Tarbush says:

In the realm of the written word, Gallerie has poetry from the late Mahmoud Darwish, in translation from Arabic, and from Nathalie Handal who lives and works in New York, and Jerusalem-born Najwan Darwish.

I find it odd that, over at the magazine’s website, the editor’s note separates “Palestinians” from “Christians”; I’m not sure what Palestinian Christians would make of that. But the issue does investigate a great deal of Palestinian art, and includes poetry by the great Mahmoud Darwish, Najwan Darwish, and American-French-Palestinian Nathalie Handal.

Unfortunately, very little content is available (free) online.

Meanwhile:

Verso books would like you to read their books “on the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Not sure why Mahmoud Darwish’s collection of poems, Mural, is “on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” nor Hamid Dabashi’s book about Palestinian cinema, but so it goes.

Also:

To mark Israeli book week, Haaretz has put together an authors’ edition. I popped over to see if there were any Arabs on board. There is a submission from Sami Michael, who was born in Baghdad and now writes in Hebrew—I found it uninspiring. There is also a piece by Jamaica Kincaid (and I love Jamaica Kincaid) about watching the flotilla shooting on TV: uninspiring. Milan Kundera is the silliest; he writes on why we should free Roman Polanski. To quote The Literary Saloon‘s M.A. Orthofer:

Why express concern about, say, those in Gaza, or Gilad Shalit and his family when it’s kid-rapist Polanski that’s really suffering (stuck in a Swiss chalet, the poor guy … those surely can’t compare to the comforts of those Gazan … chalets …)

Haaretz: If you do this next year, try harder.