Arabic ‘Summer Bookshop’ Opens in Brussels

On Tuesday June 18, Lagrange Points re-opened their Arabic Summer Bookshop in Brussels:


The summer bookshop — a collaboration between Lagrange Points, BOZAR, Chaire Mahmoud Darwich, and MUG Coffee — is set to be open for the next three months. The shop promises a collection of new Arabic books, artwork, and a summer terrace.

They are, they write, “Brussels’ first international cookstore café with Arab identity, a place for literature, music, art, film, events & public conversations.”

They add:

Are you an Arabic speaker and looking for a place where you can read Al-Mutanabbi and listen to Fairouz while drinking a nice Arabic coffee?
Are you learning Arabic and looking for a place where you can buy a book and practice the language while meeting new people?
Are you interested in Arab literature but you cannot read Arabic?
We got you covered!

The name comes from a concept from astrophysics. A Lagrangian point “is a location in space where the combined gravitational forces of two large bodies, such as Earth and the sun. The interaction of the forces creates a point of balance and harmony.”

Lagrange Points also maintains a bilingual blog about Arabic literature with posts that range from accounts of events, such as an evening with Iraqi writer Ali Badr, to book reviews, to a post on “The Mall as a Reflection of Contemporary Culture in the Work of Mahmoud Al-Wardani and Vaporwave Music.” Several posts are available both in English and in Arabic.

The bookshop is located at Ravensteinstraat 18; you can find more at their Facebook page and website.