Writing Through Crisis is a podcast series that, according to organizers, "explores the possibility of recovery through language."
Islam Nawwar’s ‘Don’t Say that My Son Is Walking in Heaven’
"And I’m still surprised by the highly specific classification of my identity / On my ID card, where they wrote: / Male, Muslim, single."
Two Books Translated from Arabic Make 2020 NTA Prose Longlist
Yesterday, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the longlists for the 2020 National Translation Awards (NTA) in Poetry and Prose. Two works translated from Arabic -- a novel and a collection of interlinked short stories -- made the twelve-book longlist for prose.
Sunday Classics: Erotic Surrealist Poet Joyce Mansour
"Mansour took much of her inspiration from ancient religions and traditions, including ancient Egypt, where death is not considered to be the end of life, but rather is a transition to another reality."
On Latifa al-Zayyat Day: ‘Her Laughter Brought Me Up Short’
"The woman was always surprising me with her continuous, sometimes abrupt, and loud laughter; and then she no longer surprised me — I got used to and grew to love both Latifa herself and her laughter."
6 Questions on ‘After the Nobel’: Nonfiction by Naguib Mahfouz
"He was an all-round writer with a strong social conscience, and after seeing how he reflected on society and its ills through the indirect allegorical lens of fiction I thought it would be interesting to see how he addressed the issues that concerned him through the more direct medium of a regular newspaper column."
Summer of Lock-in Lit: Sonallah Ibrahim’s ‘Arsène Lupin’
“Look, there’s no novels,” a voice suddenly boomed directly above my head. “We don’t sell novels.”
Lock-in Lit Series: ‘The Big Battle of Mohandiseen’
"But after Ramadan, everything is permissible!"
Sonallah Ibrahim’s ’67’: Oppression and Its Unintended Consequences
"To write about [1967] is to foreground it yet again; not to write about it is to consign oneself to live with the illusion of its insignificance. . . . The way out of this double bind is to do both at the same time: this may explain why the 67 war is invoked in the title of the novel but is almost entirely absent from the preoccupations of the narrative."
From Ahmed Atallah’s ‘Mariam: A True Story’
"Mariam: A True Story" was written mostly in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, detailing the quiet love between a young Egyptian Christian man and an Egyptian Christian woman turned into a taboo by the society around them.
Friday Finds: A New Excerpt from ‘Born: The Story of Naela Kamel, née Marie Elie Rosenthal’
"Tante Aziza and Nana came over to our house on Naim Street and said that Saad wanted to marry me. We sat around the dinner table, which was a square table in the middle of the living room."
Adel Kamel (1916-2005) in Family Photos and Memories
"He was a very intellectual person, very forward thinking, sometimes too forward in his ideas. He did not really mash into the traditional Coptic orthodox conservative life."
