Lit & Found: TMR Double Summer Issue

On July 2, The Markaz Review published their 2023 double summer issue featuring many brilliant writers, translators, and artists, including former and current ArabLit contributors.

Journal editor Malu Halasa, introducing the issue, writes:

If pictures are worth a thousand words then short stories are worth a thousand-and-one. The Markaz Review’s special literary issue features short stories, memoir, plays, a graphic novel, and literary nonfiction. Some of it, which appears in English for the first time, was translated from Arabic or Persian. The themes are wide-ranging, from domestic abuse in Egypt from a child’s point of view to multiracial relationships in London and queer experience in Beirut. Some stories straddle that gray area between fiction and nonfiction.

We obviously recommend Samira Azzam’s “Tears From a Glass Eye,” tr. Ranya Abdelrahman, which first appeared in Out Of Time, a collection of Samira’s short stories published by ArabLit Books last December. Another favorite is an excerpt from Rawand Issa’s graphic novel Inside the Giant Fish (translated for TMR by Amy Chiniara), which featured front and center on a recent Bulaq episode. Finally, don’t miss ArabLit contributor Ibrahim Fawzy’s translation of “Hayat and the Rain,” by Mona Alshammari.

Find the whole issue here.