Bassma Sheikho’s ‘Scream’
“No electricity tonight. / Boredom is about to kill me.”
“No electricity tonight. / Boredom is about to kill me.”
In this conversation with ArabLit’s Tugrul Mende, translator Alex Elinson talks about how literary prizes affect the translation landscape, the draw of detective novels, and how he hones voice in a novel with many starring characters.
This essay, by the extraordinary Syrian writer Samar Yazbek, appears in our latest issue, SYRIA: Fall of Eternity, ed. Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam.
On Mondays this winter, we are publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.
“It is no easy task to tell the Syrian tale, one that is written—and still being written—in the midst of both darkness and light.”
As publication dates often slip — and new books surface — we try to have a glance at what’s really (to the best of our knowledge) coming in translation from Arabic at the start of each month. If you have more books to add, please let us know.
In this classic short story, a woman tries to find a love of equals in early twentieth century Cairo.
“In the beginning, we considered his visit nothing more than an illusion or a daydream, until one evening the village dogs suddenly hushed and stared, bewildered, into the darkness.”
This is the story of the protests that broke out in Jerusalem’s Old City on June 5, 1968, marking the one year anniversary of the Six-Day War.