Nakba Day: Free Palestinian Ebooks, Magazines, More Recommended Reading

There are at least two digital Nakba Day events today; one with poet Najwan Darwish and another the kickoff events for Palestine Art Week:

Also to mark Nakba Day, which commemorates Palestinians’ ongoing, 73-year resistance to expulsion from their homes and lands, Saqi Books is offering 20 Palestinian e-books from their back catalog free to interested readers.

They write: “These Saqi titles are essential to the study and celebration of Palestinian history and culture. These memoirs, literary collections, novels and histories are written by Palestinians, as well as by experts in their respective fields.”

The available books include Mahmoud Darwish’s A River Dies of Thirst, translated by Catherine Cobham; the wide-ranging anthology A Map of Absence, ed. Atef Alshaer; Sayed Kashua’s bitterly funny Native; Raba’i al-Madhoun’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-shortlisted A Lady from Tel Aviv, tr. Elliott Colla; Christiane Dabdoub Nasser’s Classic Palestinian Cuisine; and more.

They also quote Darwish, from A River Dies of Thirst:

‘But to passing snipers

Not singing to us

In a cage, alone

Tomorrow, we will remember that we left the canary

And so is happiness …

Singing in a cage is possible’

Mizna magazine has also made their Palestine issue available free in a digital edition.

Other reading lists include a poetry reading list put together by The Jerusalem Fund, a scholarly reading list from Stanford University Press, and a reading list for young people — with mostly Arabic literature, but some English titles — assembled by Hadi Badi. For those who teach university, Jadaliyya has put together a special section on Sheikh Jarrah, Expulsion, Occupation, and Settler Colonialism for their Middle East Learn & Teach Series.

Also, there’s Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba, ed. Basma Ghalayini, which focuses on the Nakba as a starting point from which to explore the future. You can read an excerpt from Mazen Maarouf’s story “The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid” on Lithub and editor Basma Ghalayini’s introduction to the collection on the Comma Press blog.