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.
Country Focus
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.”
Said Khatibi and the Algerian Crime Novel
Algerian novelist Said Khatibi talks with us about his latest novel, and the conversation turns to organ theft, the global shifts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and what he hopes to illuminate with crime novels: not the whodunit, but the why.
From Zuhair Al Hiti’s ‘A Nest of Embers’
This is the story of Zafaran, a young man trying to escape the labels slapped on Sabeans, who leaves Baghdad hoping to find freedom in a small village. Yet, as soon as he arrives, he is recognized as the “Sabean,” and his life takes a new turn, such that he not only faces the myths about Sabeans but the village’s inner darkness.
On ‘The Open Novelistic Corpus: The Art of Narrative Storytelling in Tayeb Salih’s Work’
The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month. BULAQ discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her.
Short Fiction in Translation: Azher Jirjees’s ‘The Reed Horse’
The Arabic original of this short story appears in the 2017 edition of Azher Jirjees’s collection The Sweetmaker.
Laughter Without Joy: Between Gaza’s Reality and Beckett’s Stage
In this essay by Husam Maarouf, he writes: “Isn’t it strange for someone to laugh in Gaza? Here, laughter is not because destruction is amusing or enjoyable—it is a moment of nakedness before the self, a full exposure. One has no choice but to laugh.”
‘Subject: Mirror, Mirror’: An Excerpt
This excerpt from Badar Salem’s “Lonely as a Crowded Room” was translated by the author.