Sleeping is Davies’s third translation of Khoury’s work. The first was the New York Times notable Gate of the Sun, and the second was the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-shortlisted Yalo. Those earlier novels, like most by the celebrated Lebanese author, resist conclusion, circling around and around, unfurling stories without reaching an end.
My piece today on Al Masry Al Youm: Nobody feels the joy of the Eid as much as children, and when we were children, we could hardly contain our excitement […]
New in Al Masry Al Youm, a review of Khairy Shalaby’s The Hashish Waiter, trans. Adam Talib and published by AUC Press this year. For those interested, last month we also ran a Q&A with Talib.
I have been trying to put together a list of fall Arab and Arabic literary events for major U.S. and Canadian cities, as I did for the U.K. last week. I think it’s time to admit defeat. Or at least that I need help. Book festivals, apparently, are not the right place to look.
There has been some debate, on this site, over Fatima Sharafeddine’s Rule 7: It is very difficult to translate a bad text. Refuse to do it because, as a writer, […]
Beirut39-winning novelist Samar Yazbek was detained and beaten. Syrian songwriter Ibrahim al-Qashoush, author of a popular anti-regime song, was murdered, his vocal cords apparently ripped from his throat. And now political cartoonist Ali Farzat, Damascus’s “Pen of Steel,” has had his head, arms, and hands severely beaten.
Thanks to the help of young Libyan authors Ghazi Gheblawi and Mohamed Mesrati, I was able to put together a short-order essay about Libyan lit for Al Masry Al Youm: “New Life for New Libyan Literature.”
Fatima Sharafeddine is an award-winning children’s book writer—her YA novel, Faten, won first prize at the 2010 Beirut Book Fair. She has written and published more than 45 books, and […]
The flight of Jews from many Arab nations in the middle of the last century was no small event. However, Jewish characters—and I mean particularly from this 1950s exodus—are rare in Arabic fiction.
