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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ibrahim’s referring to Al-Talasus, out soon as Stealth from Aflame Books. And my God it’s good. A review of the original here. “I don’t expect anything in return for completing […]
That’s the headline from the UAE-based Khaleej Times, and it’s certainly the headline for me, too. I know almost nothing about Saudi literature, except that there have been a number […]
In a forthcoming interview, translator Humphrey Davies disagrees with assertions that Arab literature is under-translated. He says he wishes that someone would make a list, because “there’s a lot more […]
The last three stories in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology all struck me, although not as deeply as Khudayyir, Naqqash, or Shimon. Ibtisam Abdullah’s second story, “The Other in the […]
