Short Fiction: Adania Shibli’s ‘A Tin Ball’
This story appeared in the FOOTBALL issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which you can still get in print and digital. A Tin Ball By Adania Shibli Translator anonymous The war, it seemed, was […]
Fiction
Short Fiction in Translation: Mahdi Issa al-Saqr’s ‘The Return’
Mahdi Issa al-Saqr (1927-2006) was born in Basra and published his first short-story collection, مجرمون طيبون (Criminals with Kind Hearts) in 1954. That same year, he and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab […]
Short Fiction in Translation: Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘The Crucified Sheep’
Introduction by Rachel Green This previously untranslated story, written in Kuwait in 1960 and published in Kanafani’s first collection, Death of Bed 12 (1961), provides a glimpse into some of […]
New Fiction in Translation & an Author Talk: Said Khatibi’s ‘The End of the Sahara’
In the latest episode of the BULAQ podcast, Episode 100, co-hosts Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey talk to Algerian novelist Said Khatibi about his novel The End of the Sahara, which […]
Short Fiction in Translation: Najwa Binshatwan’s ‘The Eavesdropper’
By Najwa Binshatwan Translated by Salma Moustafa Khalil She went to the library in the morning and stayed for two hours. She called the plumber as soon as she left; […]
From May Telmissany’s ‘Everyone Says I Love You’
The 2021 novel Everyone Says I Love You, by acclaimed Egyptian novelist May Telmissany, was longlisted for the 2023 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. For Women in Translation Month, ArabLit […]
Daisy Al-Amir’s ‘The Tale of the Oil Jug’
Each stood combing their hair and tidying their clothes and looking at themselves; some admiring themselves and some gazing at their reflections in despair.
From Enayat al-Zayyat’s ‘Love and Silence
It’s publication week for Iman Mersal’s award-winning Traces of Enayat, which appears from And Other Stories in Robin Moger’s deft and considered English translation. Mersal’s genre-encompassing book — an excerpt of […]
Summer Reads: ‘The Government Sea’
“When the central government announced a plan to rebuild what the war had devastated, the municipality put forth a request to establish a sea. Unlike other requests, which usually lingered in a state of neglect, tucked away in drawers, the central government responded right away, as they didn’t have any drawers in their offices in which to hide such paperwork.”