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Forthcoming August 2026: Plays by Mahfouz, Fiction from Palestine

Dreams of Ayn Ara, by Sara Abu Ghazal, tr. Katharine Halls (Feminist Press, August 18 2026)

From the publisher:

In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.

Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic — culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.

Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.

Also read:

An interview with Sara Abu Ghazal,” Middle East Report 309 (Winter 2023)

The Devil Turns Preacher: Eight One-act Plays, by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Sarah Enany and Nehad Selaiha (American University in Cairo Press, August 18 2026)

From the publisher:

To mark twenty years since the death of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, his only collection of plays are to be published worldwide in English for the first time

Naguib Mahfouz is a literary icon, and the only Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been celebrated across the globe for his novels and short stories, which have been translated into over forty languages. But what is not known by many is that he made a foray into drama: he wrote eight one-act plays in the 1960s and 1970s. They were performed in Cairo at the time and then largely forgotten – overtaken by his immensely successful fiction writing.

These forgotten gems showcase Mahfouz’s bold storytelling and mastery of suspense and pace. Eclectic in their dramatic style and suggesting far-reaching dramatic influences from Ionesco to Camus to Beckett. They are filled with political subtext and symbolize, in dramatic form, a monumental period in Egyptian history, including war with Israel and the death of Nasserism.

Later this month:

Look for an excerpt from the introduction on ArabLit.