“I have not kept count of the books, both fiction and non-fiction, that I have edited since I joined the AUC Press in 1986, but each one has been different, each one has had its challenges and its rewards, and from each one I have learned many things.”
“El-Wardany refuses those depictions of sleeping as a passive act. Also, interestingly, he observes the moment of getting to sleep and builds his ideas on it, away from the usual talk about the dreams.”
Shaykha Aida scolded her sister. “Must you really?”
“The mute knocked into me.”
“I’ll give you a knock!”
“There are codes that you have no access to — and therefore you, like my traveler, are blind.”
“In these thirty years, Hewison has done perhaps more than any other individual to shape the corpus of Arabic literature in English translation.”
My sister screamed in the night
Take me to my brother’s house
And there she screamed that same night
No no! Take me back to the house of my father
“Now, after a translation of Simic’s ironic voice, and a prose book full of complicated feelings around being a mother, can we expect new shadows from both in Mersal’s coming poems?”
and marble like ivory
gleaming damply
with daylight dwindling
till shadows swallow
stealing footfalls
and three lifts to the left.
“In both my fiction and my academic writing, I have long been interested in the mutually constitutive roles of ruler and ruled. I am intent on exploring how this manipulates people’s fates, and am determined to resist the ways it reshapes their understanding of the world.”
“One thing I want to add to that is that ‘Cigarette Number Seven,’ in dealing with the unfinished dream of one woman, is mainly about the idea that everything – experiences, emotions, attempts to change the world— moves in cycles that never reach a clear end or resolution. There can be a lot of pain in that.”
“The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) condemned the confiscation of the assets of Alef Bookstore in all its branches all over Egypt’s governorates.”
“That was a girl who intuitively knew that modesty resides in denying her female identity.”
