From Doaa Ibrahim’s ‘A Cloud Above My Head’
In this novel, Egyptian author Doaa Ibrahim interrogates mothers and motherhood through the lens of a violently fraught relationship.
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About mlynxqualey
Posts by Marcia Lynx Qualey:
Remembering Sonallah Ibrahim: His ‘Arsène Lupin’
Sonallah Ibrahim died this week at the age of 88. His “Arsène Lupin,” originally written in the al-Wahat Prison Camp, Western Desert, Egypt, in 1963, appeared in translation in the Summer 2020 CRIME issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
Translation as Knowledge Production
In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Samah Selim discuss authorship and adaptations in translated texts, Samah’s “Turjoman” project and the ways in which the field of translation is specific to location, her translation of Arwa Salih, and the “small arsenal of knowledge, resilience, and love” Salih’s work continues to bring into the world.
Towering Egyptian Novelist Sonallah Ibrahim Dies at 88
Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim — one of the great literary innovators of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — died today, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture announced. He was eighty-eight.
‘Prison in a Burning Tank’
“These are the worst days. I don’t know why I’ve been using superlatives so much lately, or saying “for the first time,” as though my mind were instantly classifying every experience against prior facts or illusions. Perhaps it would be enough to say they’re terrible days, without comparing them to other dark ones.”
‘Oxygen is Not for the Dead’: The Life and Legacy of Hiba Abu Nada
During a book fair in Qatar, Hiba wrote, “My book has been to several book fairs, and I have not been to even one. How far away we are from the world in Gaza, and how many places are empty of us.”
On Batool Abu Akleen’s ’48kg’
As Hilary Plum writes in this review of ’48kg,’: “Abu Akleen is young, yet her book exceptionally renders a preternatural intimacy with death.”
New Short Fiction: Saga Hamdan’s ‘Fragility’
A beautifully tender, skin-of-ice-on-water short fiction by Saga Hamdan, translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood.
‘I Bequeath Life to You, for We Die without Life Knowing Us’
“I have always tried to keep an eye on death, making plans to distract it, to make it wait, so that it would get bored and leave what remains of me, my remains. We are all remains here.” -Nima Hasan