Forthcoming Feb 2024: ‘Girl Detective Meets 1001 Nights,’ ’15 Poets,’ & a New Syrian Novel
Each month, we preview Arabic books forthcoming in English translation, with a few exceptions; as here, we also list Gazan novelist Atef Abu Saif’s Don’t Look Left.
As always, if you know of books we’ve missed, please let us know in the comments or at info@arablit.org.
Where the Wind Calls Home, by Samar Yazbek, tr. Leri Price (World Editions)
From the publisher:
Ali, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole—is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn’t there … While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety.
Through rich vignettes of Ali’s memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life and hope and love.
The Djinn’s Apple, by Djamila Morani, tr. Sawad Hussain (Neem Tree Press)
From the publisher:
Winner of an English PEN Translates Award.
Historical fiction meets crime fiction in The Djinn’s Apple, an award-winning YA murder mystery set in the Abbasid period—the golden age of Baghdad.
A ruthless murder. A magical herb. A mysterious manuscript.
When Nardeen’s home is stormed by angry men frantically in search of something—or someone—she is the only one who manages to escape. And after the rest of her family is left behind and murdered, Nardeen sets out on an unyielding mission to bring her family’s killers to justice, regardless of the cost…
Full of mystery and mayhem, The Djinn’s Apple is perfect for fans of Arabian Nights, City of Brass, and The Wrath and the Dawn.
Note that we’ll have an excerpt of this “girl detective meets 1001 Nights” novel on Monday.
Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets, ed. Omar Berrada and Sarah Riggs (Litmus Press)
From the publisher:
A trilingual experimental collection bringing together an impressive array of contemporary Arab poets and literary translators in and across Arabic, English, and French languages.
ANOTHER ROOM TO LIVE IN is an archive of encounter: a multilingual conversation between fifteen poet-translators, connected through friendship, correspondence, and cross-diasporic gatherings. With work in English, Arabic, and French, the collection moves beyond both language and nation-state, investing instead in transcontinental dreamspaces. Here, translation practices collaboratively transform the poems and reflect the poets’ own experiences of “living” in multiple languages. Complicating any flat conception of identity, the poems presented here seek to revisit and challenge foundational narratives, to rework mythologies, and to do all this through a cross-generational process of translation as poetic communion.
Contributors include: Etel Adnan, Hoda Adra, Sinan Antoon, Mirene Arsanios, Omar Berrada, Sara Elkamel, Soukaina Habiballah, Marilyn Hacker, Golan Haji, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Pierre Joris, Mona Kareem, Souad Labbize, Rachida Madani, Alisha Mascarenhas, Iman Mersal, Aya Nabih, Sarah Riggs, Yasmine Seale, Cole Swensen, Habib Tengour, and Sam Wilder.
Also:
From the publisher:
On October 7, Israeli territory around the Erez border of Gaza Strip was invaded in a surprise attack by Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades. In response to this, the people of Gaza have been subjected to nearly three months of wholesale genocide. Over 20,000 civilians have been killed, an estimated million made homeless and displaced, tens of thousands injured, and an entire population traumatised. Never in living history has such an atrocity been perpetrated in plain sight of the world’s leaders and mainstream media, who have all somehow managed to give it their complete backing. Images and video clips of hourly horrors and tragedies have spread around the world, combatted by fake news propagated not by dark conspiratorial corners on the web, but by corporate media outlets and politicians. Baseless Israeli propaganda and deliberately-biased framing has been fed to journalists and repeated, without question, on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and in the mouths of TV pundits and politicians. One of the few voices of Gaza to make it out into Western media has been that of writer Atef Abu Saif’, whose diary entries have been occasionally serialised (with edits and framing) in places like The New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and elsewhere. Here, the complete, unedited diaries show the journey of a man who arrived in Gaza just a few days before October 7 as a government minister and ended the period, like most other Palestinians, living in a tent in a refugee camp. If we allow our understanding of world events to be corrupted and spun by lazy, compliant journalism, we will never understand them, even those happening in real-time, before our very eyes. These diaries give us a rare exit ramp from this state of ignorance.
More about this book, coming from eight publishers in seven languages, here on ArabLit.