Classic Short Fiction: Shehata Ebeid’s ‘Fidelity’
This short story is taken from Shehata Ebeid’s collection A Painful Lesson, published in 1922.
Fiction
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.
From Georgia Makhlouf’s ‘Bitter Country’
Georgia Makhlouf’s Pays Amer (Presses de la Cité, 2024) won the 2025 Prix Méditerranée des lecteurs, awarded by the “Des livres et nous” circle of the Perpignan Media Library, and is a finalist for the 2025 Prix de la Littérature Arabe. This excerpt comes from Chapter 18.
Summer Short Fiction: Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni’s ‘Mimi’
This short story is taken from Ibrahim Al-Mazni’s short-story collection Fi Al-Tareeq (On the Road), published in 1937. Most of the 20-odd stories in the collection are humorous or satirical.
Short Fiction in Translation: Mohamed Kheir’s ‘Duty Calls’
“Duty Calls” is from Mohamed Kheir’s 2014 short-story collection, Blink. As translator Caroline Benson writes, “Mohamed Kheir is at the forefront of a group of Egyptian writers known for astonishing readers with their ability to capture the poetics of quotidian contemporary life. The strength of Kheir’s writing lies in its creative and imaginative probings of the tensions, layers, and contradictions of gender, emigration, family, politics, and class.”
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.