A Few Things to Look Forward to: Literary Events in January 2011
Goodbye 2010, hello….
December 2010
Should There Be Quotas for Women in Saudi Book Clubs?
Al-Khamees, whose The Leafy Tree was longlisted for the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), said that Saudi women’s participation in literary clubs should be supported with specific membership quotas, according to ArabNews.
What’s Wrong with 35 Naguib Mahfouz Translations?
To Arab readers Mahfouz does in fact have a distinctive voice, which displays a remarkable mastery of language yet does not call attention to itself. But in English he sounds like each of his translators, most of whom (with one or two exceptions) are not stylists and, I am sorry to say, appear not to have completely understood what he is really about.
A Palestinian-American Poet’s Virtual Book Tour and More Poems for Gaza
Yesterday on The Huffington Post, Anis Shivani introduced three emerging poets who have books scheduled for release in early 2011. One of them was the Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi, whose debut collection, Thirteen Departures from the Moon, is set to come out from Press 53 in March.
Help Out with a Journal Issue About Football in the ‘Middle East’
Issam Khalidi, Alon Raab, and James Montague are looking for “scholarly essays, poetry, fiction, and art about the history and culture of football in the Middle East for a special issue of the journal Soccer and Society.”
Reading Arabic Novels About Americans
There was a moment last night, when Miral al-Tahawy and Bahaa Abdelmeguid were talking about American children, that I wanted to step in and give my opinion on the matter—as though the Kotob Khan event were a chat show and not a discussion of al-Tahawy’s prize-winning 2010 novel, Brooklyn Heights.
How Do You Translate Punctuation!!?
When I first started working as a journalist, one of my co-workers was enchanted by the exclamation point. Perhaps he liked other punctuation, too, but he particularly loved to add one or two or three of these (!) to a smacking good, or smacking corny, headline.
Egypt’s Youssef Ziedan Phenomenon
Last night, a glance at the (Korba) Shorouk bookstore’s bestseller rack showed, unsurprisingly, that three of the top five slots were taken by books written by scholar-cum-novelist Dr. Youssef Ziedan.*
Friday Links: A Driver on Alef’s ‘Knowledge Taxis’; Writers Say No to Normalization with Israel; Reviews & More
A Cairo driver comments on Alef’s ‘knowledge taxi’ project: Gulf News has a brief report on the Alef bookstore chain’s “knowledge taxi” project: “Cairo taxi libraries a boon for clients […]