Has it been a while since you last read Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club? Well, then I encourage you to read it again. From my glance at the classic novel (and what it says about Egypt, then and now) in AGNI online:
The season of the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, or, if you must, “Arabic Booker”) has begun.
This week, Alaa Hamed, who is now a representative of the Egyptian Secular Party, said Salafi leaders destroyed the fence around his house with bulldozers, in part because of his books.
Weidner asserts that the choice is “cowardly,” because Sansal is not critical of any of the sacred German cows and further that Sansal is only “half Arab” because he does’t write in Arabic. (We’ll just ignore that second, odd bit of criticism.)
Since a trip up north isn’t in the cards, I sent some questions to Jennifer Chevalier, the center’s Assistant Director. She very helpfully separated my questions into two piles and directed some to PTC founder and poet Sarah Maguire and some to Arabic-language poet and PTC translation-workshop leader Worod Musawi. What follows is the first half, the Q&A with Sarah Maguire.
There’s only two things: literature that is real and literature that is not.
There have been a number of reports about the effect of liberation from Ghaddafi in parts of Libya. A new report from Agence France-Press says that, in the newly Ghaddafi-free zones, poetry and journalism have been flourishing.
Booksellers, authors, and publishers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan expressed interest yesterday in the idea of a “universal” Arabic bestseller list. The idea came out of a Abu Dhabi publishers’ training workshop that Salwa Shakhashir (Dar al-Salwa) blogged about for Publishing Perspectives.
Just as last year, Salwa Shakhashir (of Dar al-Salwa) blogged for Publishing Perspectives from the publishers’ training course hosted by Abu Dhabi International Book Fair organizers in the UAE. Shakhashir touches on a number of issues, including:
Tip sheets, galleys, and social media—ways for Arab publishers to promote books to reviewers
