Forthcoming March 2023: New Poetry, Epic Tales of Exile, Stories of Lost Children, and More
As always, there may be books we have missed. If there are, please let us know in the comments or at info@arablit.org.
Out of Gaza, ed. Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison
Out March 1 from SmokeStack Books, Out of Gaza is an anthology edited by Palestinian scholar-translator Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison. The anthology, which Smokestack Books is calling “an emergency collection of poems” brings together work by fifteen Palestinian writers about the current moment, including poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, Hala Alyan, Farid Bitar, Ali Abukhattab, Marwan Makhoul, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Mohammed Mousa, Dareen Tatour and Sara Saleh. They add that a percentage of all sales will go to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
In his introduction, Alshaer writes, “Poetry at times of grave violence and danger as that experienced by the 2.3 million living in Gaza is something akin to the terrible impossible in all our dreams. But the higher calling of humanity makes poetry a duty, a duty to register pain and communion between and with the oppressed, with those whose very lives are under severe risk. In this case, poetry is a duty because it records the last stand of the soul as it stares death and destruction in the face, such keenness for the human voice to survive, and live long after humanity failed to preserve life and after all the cries for justice were not heeded.”
Before the Queen Falls Asleep, by Huzama Habayeb, tr. Kay Heikennen (MacLehose) 
From the publisher:
Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy’s clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father.
Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Malika prepares to leave home to attend university abroad, her mother revisits the past of their Palestinian family, tenderly describing their life in exile in Kuwait and her own experiences of love and loss as she grows up.
Huzama Habayeb weaves a richly observed and affectionate portrait of a Palestinian family displaced from their homeland, exploring with humour and poise the love and betrayal that pursues Jihad and her family from Kuwait to Jordan to Dubai. This is a novel whose words will resound long after you finish the final page.
The Last Crossing, by Badriya Al-Badri, tr. Katherine Van De Vate (Dar Arab)From the publisher:
When the Egyptian architect Mukhtar arrives in Oman to oversee a building project, he finds it’s a bait-and-switch. Instead of drawing up building plans, he is trapped into doing back-breaking manual labour. As Mukhtar is forced from one demeaning job to the next, he pines for Houria, the love he left behind in the hopes of making enough money to support her. As he navigates the underbelly of the Omani economy, he and Houria exchange increasingly passionate messages. But reluctant to admit his failure, Mukhtar refuses to return until an unexpected turn of events makes the decision for him.
Weaving together stories of migrant labourers in Oman with those of their loved ones back home, The Last Crossingbeautifully articulates its principal theme: the harsh realities that face migrants in Oman. The first Omani novel to focus on the lives of expatriate workers, this story brings to life their varied motivations and personalities. Al-Badri’s powerful tale of one man’s migration for love is a searing portrait of the realities that lie beneath the surface of Oman’s prosperous economy.
Lost In Mecca, by Bothayna Al-Essa, tr. Nada Faris (Dar Arab)From the publisher:
Lost in Mecca is a powerful and heart-wrenching novel by Bothayna Al-Essa about loss and the search for meaning. The story follows a seven-year-old Kuwaiti boy who goes missing during the Hajj pilgrimage, introducing his parents to a darker side of Mecca. As they search for their child, the family uncovers painful truths about political and social realities that force them to confront their privilege. Through oscillating points of view, the novel exposes a world of crime that raises deeper questions about what justice means today and how our world determines the value of human life.
Lost in Mecca is a stunning work of contemporary Arabic literature for its exploration of the contemporary human condition in a thought-provoking and an unforgettable way.
Huddud’s House, by Fadi Azzam, tr. Ghada Alatrash
From the publisher:
How far is love willing to travel in search of its own lost voice?
When tyranny unleashes destructive forces that threaten to overwhelm a country, what are the effects on the lives and choices of ordinary humans? When citizens become inhabitants of a land of extremes, what do they do, to whom do they flee?
Shadowing the days of Syria’s Arab spring, Fadi Azzam’s epic novel, Huddud’s House—a haunting, contemporary novel rooted in the soil of Damascus, the oldest inhabited city in humanity—is a sprawling tale of love in time of war. Focusing on a quartet of characters torn between leaving and returning to Damascus, it follows intertwining stories of love and violence to their boundaries.
Azzam writes the spirit of resilience and resistance of the Syrian peoples. A saga on the dangers of ignoring threats or forgetting atrocities, he braves a long-distance search for his people’s voice, one that violence cannot silence.
The Doctors’ Dinner Party, by Ibn Buṭlān, translated by Philip F. Kennedy and Jeremy Farrell
The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an eleventh-century satire in the form of a novella, set in a medical milieu. A young doctor from out of town is invited to dinner with a group of older medical men, whose conversation reveals their incompetence. Written by the accomplished physician Ibn Buṭlān, the work satirizes the hypocrisy of quack doctors while displaying Ibn Buṭlān’s own deep technical knowledge of medical practice, including surgery, blood-letting, and medicines. He also makes reference to the great thinkers and physicians of the ancient world, including Hippocrates, Galen, and Socrates.
Combining literary parody with social satire, the book is richly textured and carefully organized: in addition to the use of the question-and-answer format associated with technical literature, it is replete with verse and subtexts that hint at the infatuation of the elderly practitioners with their young guest. The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an entertaining read in which the author skewers the pretensions of the physicians around the table.
On Ethics and Character Traits: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 9, Brethren of Purity Series, edited and translated by Omar Alí-de-Unzaga
From the publisher:
The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brethren of Purity), the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables.
This volume presents the original text of Epistle 9, with a clear English translation, introduction, and notes. This epistle is a major treatise on ethics and character traits, which drinks from two sources: the Greek tradition, especially Plato, Aristotle, and Galen; and Islamic revelation. A true repository of virtues and vices, it explores four causes for the diversity of characters, defines five types of souls, and divides society into eight classes. The authors emphasize the dichotomy inward/outward, elevating the guides of the inward interpretation of revelation. They also include a sophisticated understanding of the symbolic meaning of Satan, which could be described as ‘spiritual psychology’. The concept of renunciation of worldliness dominates the second half, as do descriptions of the ‘Friends of God’ as epitomes of moral virtues. Overall, the epistle contains numerous illustrative stories, an unusual number of Qur’anic verses and hadith, and also rare examples of pseudo-quotes from the Biblical tradition and munajat-style texts.