Al Masry Al Youm TV recently interviewed American University in Cairo Press (AUCP) Associate Director Neil Hewison about how US-Egyptian relations influence the press, the press’s 10-year plan, his thoughts on al-Sisi, and more.
Just a few days after all the works by Saudi publisher Arab Network for Research and Publishing were removed from the Riyadh International Book Fair for violating the Kingdom’s laws, the works of globally celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish caused protests and have reportedly been withdrawn from the fair and are not to be sold.
“Tonight is your birthday: the thirteenth of March. And you want an occasion to wrest a deceptive happiness from the grim days.”
The giant Riyadh International Book Fair is set to close on Friday, and this year’s fair has not been without its explosive event.
There are books from sixteen different languages and twenty different countries on this year’s Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) longlist — including two from Nobel Prize winners (Elfriede Jelinek and Moa Yan). But perhaps the outlier of the bunch is Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq’s “Leg Over Leg,” which BTBA judge M.A. Orthofer has called “the most important literary publication of a translation into English, in terms of literary history and our understanding of it, in years.”
In June 2012, Eman Hylooz and Tamim Al Manaseer co-founded Abjjad, an Arabic social network for books with a big vision.
If there were two disappointments I had while reading the opening chapter of Sinan Antoon’s The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry, “Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf: Genealogies,” they were: 1) that the full book is listed at more than $70, and 2) that there wasn’t a companion historical novel that gives full imaginative license to a re-crafting of Ibn al-Hajjaj and his contemporaries.
A novel where the “days are all much the same, bringing nothing new” is a difficult thing to pull off. And Fahd al-Atiq’s “Life on Hold,” trans. Jonathan Wright, couldn’t be characterized as a page-turner. But the book does manage to craft a compelling narrative about the contradictions of contemporary Riyadh even as the protagonist remains stranded in nowhere-land
The Muscat International Book Fair in Oman, which closes tomorrow and has in the past seen 800,000-some visitors, saw an infrastructural push this year. Meanwhile, the giant Riyadh Book Fair — which sees between one and two million visitors — opened on March 5.
