Pull-shit!
Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas El Abd shares the sinews of Palahniuk’s Fight Club—yes—and the wounded center of other boy-lit I’ve read. It’s also, of course, Egyptian, and redeemed by a […]
mlynxqualey
About mlynxqualey
Posts by Marcia Lynx Qualey:
Elias Khoury on Writing
“Pragmatic politics has nothing to do with literature. If you ask me about a pragmatic solution, I think all this complication can be solved in two minutes. There are occupied […]
Mahmoud Darwish, on Writing
RS: Do you build on the work of others? MD: Yes. Very much so. I feel that no poem starts from nothing. Humanity has produced such a huge poetic output, […]
More Mahfouz out from Anchor in Jan.
This time it’s Cairo Modern, reviewed here (un-starred) by Publishers Weekly. Now I am about to agree with the Angry Arab News Service (Dr. As`ad AbuKhalil) and his assessment that […]
Attendees Debrief following ‘Arabic Booker’ Retreat
The IPAF (“Arabic Booker”)-sponsored retreat to Baniyas Island is over, and a few of the authors—including Egypt’s Mansoura el-Ezdin, longlisted for this year’s Arabic Booker—spoke with The National about their […]
Author Fined for ‘Offensive’ Graphic Novel
Bikya Masr reports that Magdy el-Shafee and his publisher have been fined 5,000LE for the publication and distribution of Egypt’s first graphic novel, Metro. Apparently it offended public morals. You […]
Moving toward Better Arabic Children’s Lit
We were in a stationary store a few month’s back—these sometimes double as book shops in Cairo—and my six-year-old son asked for a new book. Fine, we said. There were […]
Why ‘Defending Gulf Money for the Arts’?
Youssef Ziedan recently found himself in the position of defending the inrush of Gulf money into the arts. Organizations in the Gulf, particularly the UAE, have not just been pouring […]
Cairo As Book Market
Bikya Masr has an interesting piece about the business of buying books in Cairo, seeming to attribute the rise in book-buying solely to the publication of The Yacoubian Building in […]