Publication Day for ArabLit Quarterly’s Spring 2021 Issue: SONG
The Spring 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly — with voices moist and cricketlike, stirring and gritty, ploverlike and tremulous — is available today in print and e-form.
From ArabLit Quarterly
New Fiction in Translation: ‘The Illusion of Sea’
“The place was choking, and it will always be.”
New Short Fiction: ‘Our Offering,’ by Amgad ElSabban
“Magdy’s gaze fell by accident on a tiny ad written in fine print in the bottom corner of one of the pages of a local newspaper.”
In Translation: Ameer Hamad’s ‘The Wooden Castle’
I don’t know when exactly the idea came to me: of building a castle like the ones I’d imagined when reading stories, or like the ones I’d seen in cartoons.
New Fiction in Translation: Layla Baalbaki’s ‘The Cat’
“Now, it was the beginning of summer.”
Abdallah Zrika’s ‘Funeral of the Snow Grenade’
“A dead language in the throat of a dead poet. Assassins only wait for the day of the feast. Cemeteries are only full of white beds.”
Holiday Bulaq: ‘One Thousand and One Dreams’
Yasmine is at work on a fresh translation of the Thousand and One Nights, and she reads an excerpt from her work-in-progress during the episode.
Release Party for Winter 2020 ArabLit Quarterly: Dreams
“One of the trickiest, most mysterious secrets of the Arabic language is the root h-l-m.”
‘Dear Tayeb Salih’
This letter originally appeared in the debut issue of ArabLit Quarterly: Beginnings, published in the Fall of 2018.