Classic Short Fiction: Issa Ebeid’s ‘Lady Ihsan’
In this classic short fiction from 1920, Issa Ebeid depicts a twice-divorced Egyptian woman as she examines the reasons society has made a happy, loving marriage impossible.
Fiction
‘The Children of Nut and Other Myths’: Re-imagining Ancient Egyptian Tales
Published by Takween in 2024, Egyptian novelist Muhamad A. Jamal’s أبناء نوت وأساطير أخرى : حكايات مصرية عتيقة (The Children of Nut and Other Myths: Ancient Egyptian Tales) promises to blow up your understanding of Egyptian myth and mythmaking and put it back together again, as a page-turning delight.
From Jan Dost’s Award-winning ‘Safe Corridor’
‘Safe Corridor,’ winner of the 2024 Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize, is now out from Dar Arab Books. This excerpt comes from the opening of the novel.
From a Palestinian Love Story: ‘This Stone is Mine’
This excerpt comes from pages 34–37 of Saga Hamdan’s 2024 debut novel This Stone is Mine (هذا الحجر لي), a story of love and loss between Gaza and Jenin.
Classic Short Fiction: Shehata Ebeid’s ‘Fidelity’
This short story is taken from Shehata Ebeid’s collection A Painful Lesson, published in 1922.
Remembering Sonallah Ibrahim: His ‘Arsène Lupin’
Sonallah Ibrahim died this week at the age of 88. His “Arsène Lupin,” originally written in the al-Wahat Prison Camp, Western Desert, Egypt, in 1963, appeared in translation in the Summer 2020 CRIME issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
‘Oxygen is Not for the Dead’: The Life and Legacy of Hiba Abu Nada
During a book fair in Qatar, Hiba wrote, “My book has been to several book fairs, and I have not been to even one. How far away we are from the world in Gaza, and how many places are empty of us.”
WiT-Month Special: Rachida el-Charni’s ‘God Loves Me, Credo’
To mark this Women in Translation Month, today, we share a short story by Tunisian writer Rachida el-Charni, which was shortlisted for the 2023 ArabLit Short Story Prize in Anne Willborn’s translation.
New Short Fiction: Saga Hamdan’s ‘Fragility’
A beautifully tender, skin-of-ice-on-water short fiction by Saga Hamdan, translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood.