‘My Father Chased the Free Bird’
“It is the free bird.”
Country Focus
From ‘The Country Doctor’s Tale’
At this point in ‘The Country Doctor’s Tale,’ the titular country doctor is returning from a house call when he suddenly discovers political posters everywhere, even on the walls of the clinic.
New Poetry in Translation: ‘Obituaries’
“The city wakes up in obituaries.”
Rasha Omran: ‘I Want to Smile’
“I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.”
From Saïd Khatibi’s ‘I Resist the River’s Course’
Saïd Khatibi’s I Resist the River’s Course — on the shortlist for the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), with a winner set to be announced online April 9 — chronicles half a century of Algerian history, from the Second World War to the early 1990s.
Memories of Diminishment
On a review that nearly didn’t happen.
Samar Yazbek’s ‘The Silent Night-Dwellers of Damascus’
This essay, by the extraordinary Syrian writer Samar Yazbek, appears in our latest issue, SYRIA: Fall of Eternity, ed. Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam.
Announcing the Launch of our Spring 2026 Issue: ‘SYRIA: Fall of Eternity’
“It is no easy task to tell the Syrian tale, one that is written—and still being written—in the midst of both darkness and light.”
Nazim Mizhir’s ‘Sad Heron’
“In the beginning, we considered his visit nothing more than an illusion or a daydream, until one evening the village dogs suddenly hushed and stared, bewildered, into the darkness.”