The Story of ‘Ahmed and Aziz’ in a New French Novel, ‘The Orange Grove’
“Reading ‘The Orange Grove’ with my journalist’s eye, I am tempted to pick fault with it[.]”
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Posts by Marcia Lynx Qualey:
Friday Finds: ‘Arabic Readers Are Devouring’ Books Translated from Chinese?
“Arabic readers are devouring autobiographies by Chinese entrepreneurs like Robin Li, Jack Ma, Pony Ma and Ren Zhengfei.”
IPAF Judge Sophia Vasalou on the 2017 Panel’s Criteria, Advice to Future Judges, and ‘Obligatory Sex Scenes’
“Reading a single good novel at a leisurely pace can be a pleasurable experience, but your work as judge involves consuming a non-optional slew of novels of dubious quality at breakneck speed, so it’s a very different experience altogether. But it is also stimulating, intense, and enriching, as you realise particularly when the curtain of the experience begins to fall.”
Mahmoud Hosny: Is ‘A Small Death’ Really the Best Book of the Year?
“There is also a mystical obsession with using Sufism as a means of combating rigid belief and extremism[.]”
On Contemporary Egyptian Travel Literature (and Beyond)
Travel literature? What else could be said about a place like London that has not been said before? You risk not being read or sold. I was advised by Sahar Elmougy to work on the fictional parts of the book and make an effort to turn the book into a novel. I tried and I could not.
‘Moving the Palace’: Part ‘Adventures of Baron Munchausen,’ Part Meditation on Translation and History
“Although Moving the Palace can be read anywhere, it would make an excellent summer beach read. In any event, it should savored while in a warm place, preferably on the sand, so each sentence can spread out, like a camel ambling across the desert.”
Sunday Submissions: ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program
The “non-language-specific” mentor for prose will be the brilliant Polish-English translator Bill Johnston, with the poetry mentor TBD.
‘The Desire To Go Beyond the Walls and See the World’: In Conversation with IPAF Winner Mohammad Hasan Alwan
“Yes, I am working on a new novel: it will also be a historical narrative, but with a more recent setting, in the 18th or 19th century.”
Friday Finds: Recipes from ‘Scents and Flavors’
In his introduction, Perry tells us we know this 635-recipe cookbook, soon to be published in a bilingual edition from the LAL, “was the bestseller of the age, to judge from the fact that more copies of it have survived than of all the other medieval cookbooks combined.”