How to Swim the Backstroke with a Shilka Missile
“They say this city was once beautiful.”
From ArabLit Quarterly
Sunday Classics: Safynaz Kazem’s ‘Romanticisms’
This essay and excerpted translations of Safynaz Kazem’s ran in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of ArabLit Quarterly — the ROAD issue — and reappear here as part of our series on Women in Translation Month classics.
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.”
‘Place a Hope Beyond a Hope’: Devotional Literature as Literature
“Devotional literature never gets viewed as literature because people assume it’s for devotional purposes.”
From ALQ’s Crime Issue: Meet the Banu Sasan
Brad Fox called in from lockdown in Peru to read from — and discuss — his translation (or recovery? or adaptation?) of Abu Dulaf’s “Song of the Banu Sasan.”
Occupation + 100: Listen to This Issue’s Literary Playlist
“The year is 2048, in Palestine. It’s one hundred years after the violent establishment of the state of Israel in 1948—an event known in the Arab world as “the Nakba” or “catastrophe,” forcing more than 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homes.”
Lock-in Literature: Tareq Emam’s ‘The Tale of the Woman with One Eye’
“Long ago in the City of Walls, you could see the enormous mountain of dark-blue kohl towering over the city no matter where you stood.”
Lock-in Literature: Zakaria Tamer’s ‘The Flower’
“There was a skinny roughened hand buried in the dirt. It yearned for sun and rain, for the blue sky and the wind, and for years it crept slowly upward.”
Lock-in Limited Release: Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘The Man in the Picture’
Sheikhun Muharram disappeared.