Help Support ArabLit: Buy a Back Issue
ArabLit is a communities-focused, open-door publishing collective that seeks to support translators and authors while publishing striking, fresh, and interesting literature in and about translation from (and into) Arabic. We aim to bend and reshape publishing models – to eschew the usual big-business framework while also remunerating people for their work to the best of our resources. We do not have institutional funding, but are subscriber- and advertiser-supported.
Recent economic and political upheavals have affected our income; for that reason, we are asking our reading, writing, & translating community to help ArabLit continue our work in 2025-26.
Buying one back issue will help us pay a translator, an author, an artist, a designer.
Buying five will help us support the translators in our Gaza Translation Workshop (Summer 2025).
Buying ten will support a chapter in the collection of work by May Ziadeh, collaboratively translated (forthcoming 2026).
Over the course of this Summer 2025 campaign, we hope to sell a combined 5,000 back issues: print and digital. Please help us meet our goal.
If you read ArabLit, please help out with our “buy a back issue” campaign.
As part of this campaign, we are also bringing out a new edition of Samira Azzam’s Out of Time, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman.
Here, we highlight just a few of our favorites.
The GAZA! GAZA! GAZA! issue
In this special spring issue, ArabLit Quarterly and Gaza’s Majalla 28 come together to publish words and art from Gaza. In the face of immense death and loss, the brutal and inhumane destruction of cultural and academic infrastructure, and the utter callousness of those in power, co-editors Mohammed Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Al-Shaer have collected essays, poems, and life-and-death reflections by writers living in Gaza that speak to their lives between October 2023 and March 2024.
We also have work that expands our vision of Gaza, looking back as far as ancient Egypt.
Don’t miss this wide-ranging vision of what life in Gaza has been, is, and yet could be.
The CATS issue (😼)
One of our readers’ all-time favorites, this issue features cat stories old and new. Basem Raad connects the Paris cat massacre of the 1730s to the intertwined lives of cats and humans in contemporary Jerusalem; we have incredible short fiction (Ameer Hamad’s “Schrödinger’s Cats”; Amgad ElSabban’s “Tale of the Resurrected Brother and the Metamorphosed Mother,” tr. Mona Khedr; Layla Baalbeki’s “The Cat,” tr. Tom Abi Samra; Ghada Samman’s “Beheading the Cat” and more). We have an essay by Layla AlAmmar, “A Guardian for the Untamed,” contemporary poetry, and classics, including al-Suyuti’s Merits of the Housecat, and an excerpt by al-Jawbari on how cats can assist with . . . cat burglary. And featuring gorgeous illustrations by Molly Crabapple and Maya Fidawi.
Also a great gift for any felinophilic friend, colleague, or family member.
The KITCHEN issue (🍽️)
The COOKING-themed issue of ArabLit Quarterly takes readers on a gustatory journey from the 10th century through the 21st, featuring cookbooks, guides to table manners and health, short stories, poetry, essays, and a graphic novel recipe for mahshi by the fantastically talented Sohila Khaled. As always, work ranges over eras, and includes a selection of Andalusi physician Abu Marwan ‘Abd al-Malik Ibn Zuhr’s (d. 1162 CE) Kitab al-Aghdhiya; selections from a guide to dining in company from 16th-century Damascus, translated by Hacı Osman Gündüz (Ozzy); a look at Egyptian history through the lens of cookbooks and home economics by Salma Serry; a journey through (not) making waraq enab by Yasmine Shamma; popular food fiction by Rehab Bassam; poetry on kitchen battles by Rym Jalil; and the essays that came out of the “Taste of Letters” workshop in Cairo.
A journey for the eyes, tongue, and spirit, guest-edited by Nour Kamel.
The SONG issue (🎵)
The SONG-themed issue of ArabLit Quarterly takes readers on a musical journey from the 9th century through the 21st, featuring songbooks, short stories, poetry, essays, reflections, art, a playlist, a recipe, and a graphic novel by Zahra Marwan that goes on a song-filled trip between New Mexico, Mecca, and Kuwait. As always, work ranges over eras, and includes 10th-century poetry by the polymath Kushajim; a look at music and the Divine from Esme L.K. Partridge; a journey through Palestinian resistance folk music with Shaimaa Abulebda; a look at songbooks from Andalusia and Egypt with Nicholas Mangialardi; and contemporary short stories and poetry by authors from Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.
For yourself or as a gift to any music-lover.
The FOLK issue (🧞)
This special DOUBLE ISSUE of ArabLit Quarterly centers on FOLK stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between. It features folk-tale and folk-poem adaptations, essays that trace the same folk story across the centuries (like Alaa Murad’s “Al-Yamama”), short stories, poetry, reflective essays, and a full graphic novel (“Um Hmaar Returns!”)i by the fantastically talented Zainab Almahdi. As always, work ranges over eras, and includes poetry by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Dakhil (731–788); the litterateur known as Nasir who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and enjoyed local acclaim in Mamluk-era Cairo around the year 1300 CE; a look at the history of Bahrain through the lens of folk narratives; folk poetry and a recipe from mid-twentieth-century Iraq; and (sometimes frightening) folk fiction from Yemen, Egypt, Palestine, and Saudi.
NEW EDITION: SAMIRA AZZAM’s Out of Time (🕝)
In June of 1967, after watching the shape of her country suddenly change for the second time, with hundreds of thousands more Palestinians expelled from their homes, Samira Azzam destroyed the novel she had been working on. Its title must have seemed particularly tragic in the wake of ’67: Sinai Without Borders. Two months later, at the age of 39, Azzam went on a road trip with friends. They were outside of al-Ramtha, Syria, when she suffered a heart attack and died.
We had Samira Azzam (1927–1967) for far too few years, and we never got to read what she would do with a novel. Still, she did leave us with five vivid short-story collections, as well as reviews, articles, translations, and countless hours of broadcast radio. Yet after her death, her work fell into a half-shadow, in which she was acknowledged as great, but not quite canonized. In a 2018 article on the Palestinian short story, the critic Faisal Darraj says it plainly: “Azzam has not yet received the accolades she deserves.”
This translated collection — full of her vivid snapshots of life in Palestine and Lebanon in the first half of the twentieth century — is a start at giving Samira Azzam a few of the accolades she deserves.
Slender Thorns: Award-winning Flash Fiction in Arabic and English (🌵)
For the completist, you can buy all eighteen issues of ArabLit Quarterly.
Other ways to support:
You can also subscribe via Patreon or Substack (monthly publishers’ newsletter; weekly poetry newsletter), pledge via PayPal, or advertise (reach out at info@arablit.org).
Work you will be supporting in 2025-26:
Our Translation Workshop in Gaza, also supported by Palestine Writes (forthcoming Summer 2025)
The launch of “ARABLITe,” a Spanish-language online companion to ArabLit, ed. Paula Santillán Grimm (forthcoming Fall 2025)
The publication of a classic work by May Ziadeh (forthcoming 2026)
The forthcoming SYRIA issue of ArabLit Quarterly (forthcoming 2025)
Weekday publications on ArabLit.org (translations, news, reviews, lists & more)
Our monthly newsletter for publishing professionals and our weekly poetry newsletter
Ongoing support for writers and translators in Gaza