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mlynxqualey
About mlynxqualey
Posts by Marcia Lynx Qualey:
Forthcoming in June: Poems and Essays from Gaza, Short Stories from Syria
As publication dates often slip — and new books surface — we try to have a glance at what’s really coming in translation from Arabic at the start of each month. If you have more books to add, please let us know.
Hunger That Defeats Language
“The hunger I’m experiencing now is not what I imagined. It’s not what you imagine, dear reader. It’s not just an empty feeling in your stomach. It’s a numbness that spreads from the gut to the brain. It blurs memories, weakens vision, and turns every thought into a deep excavation that the mind can’t bear. Hunger steals the simplest human abilities: concentration, patience, sensation, the desire to say something. Thinking becomes a luxury. Words become weights that cannot be lifted.”
‘Yours, Anonymous’: Letters from Cairo
Fatima El-Kalay and Mai Serhan talk about Mai’s new collection, CAIRO: the undelivered letters.
Fadwa Tuqan’s ‘A Small Song for Despair’
This poem appears in Aisha Odeh’s second memoir, A Price for the Sun, in a section in which Odeh reflects on how an engagement with poetry found in Palestinian newspapers enabled the transformation of prison into a space of community both within and outside of the prison.
From Fatma Qandil’s ‘Empty Cages’
It’s publication day for Fatima Qandil’s raw, tenderly crafted novel Empty Cages, translated to English by Adam Talib. In this excerpt, we get a glimpse of the narrator’s relationship with her mother.
Apply: Two Free Spots in ‘Bristol Translates’ Summer School
An anonymous donor is sponsoring two spots for the Arabic-English strand with Sawad Hussain in the Bristol Translates summer school taking place this July 7th-11th.
On Liberation as Writing Technique
Today, we share Fatma Qandil and Adam Talib’s wide-ranging discussion with Tugrul Mende, which touches on: the method behind Qandil’s writing, standing on the shoulders of other women writers, why this book was a challenge to translate, and the joy of being read by a younger generation.
‘Ghostly Faces’
This essay is from the Spring 2025 GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly.