In the past seven months, Arab authors have been asked to speak for their nations. Book festival-goers, journalists, and fans have asked them to explain not just their craft, but the past, present, and the future of our region.
The winner to our summer reading contest is Valerie.
I have looked for Arabic literature for my daughters, for young adults (YA), and I continue to look.
Sleeping is Davies’s third translation of Khoury’s work. The first was the New York Times notable Gate of the Sun, and the second was the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-shortlisted Yalo. Those earlier novels, like most by the celebrated Lebanese author, resist conclusion, circling around and around, unfurling stories without reaching an end.
My piece today on Al Masry Al Youm: Nobody feels the joy of the Eid as much as children, and when we were children, we could hardly contain our excitement […]
New in Al Masry Al Youm, a review of Khairy Shalaby’s The Hashish Waiter, trans. Adam Talib and published by AUC Press this year. For those interested, last month we also ran a Q&A with Talib.
I have been trying to put together a list of fall Arab and Arabic literary events for major U.S. and Canadian cities, as I did for the U.K. last week. I think it’s time to admit defeat. Or at least that I need help. Book festivals, apparently, are not the right place to look.
There has been some debate, on this site, over Fatima Sharafeddine’s Rule 7: It is very difficult to translate a bad text. Refuse to do it because, as a writer, […]
Beirut39-winning novelist Samar Yazbek was detained and beaten. Syrian songwriter Ibrahim al-Qashoush, author of a popular anti-regime song, was murdered, his vocal cords apparently ripped from his throat. And now political cartoonist Ali Farzat, Damascus’s “Pen of Steel,” has had his head, arms, and hands severely beaten.
