Friday Finds: 8 by Abdul Zahra Zaki, 5 by Riyad al-Salih al-Hussein
Life is beautiful / says the sparrow / and drops dead beside the hunter’s shoe
Lit & Found
Friday Finds: Two Short Works by Hisham Bustani, Tr. Thoraya El-Rayyes
“Yukio Mishima, why did you kill yourself like that?”
Friday Finds: A New Excerpt from ‘Born: The Story of Naela Kamel, née Marie Elie Rosenthal’
“Tante Aziza and Nana came over to our house on Naim Street and said that Saad wanted to marry me. We sat around the dinner table, which was a square table in the middle of the living room.”
Friday Finds: Muhammad El-Hajj’s ‘Two O’Clock on a Tuesday Afternoon’
Her mother’s old saying swung in her head like a pendulum: “Life is an unfortunate mess.”
Friday Finds: Excerpts from a New ‘Penguin Classic’ Edition of Youssef Idris’s ‘Cheapest Nights’
This collection, of Youssef Idris’s best-known stories, was originally released as part of Heinemann’s classic “African Writers Series,” which launched in 1957.
Friday Finds: Lina Mounzer Translates Mazen Maarouf
“We never suspected that the Lion Cub was not, in fact, a lion cub until his bicycle was stolen.”
Friday Finds: Excerpt of ‘The Magnificent Conman of Cairo’
His friend just stood there with a mocking smile on his face. When Malim was a stone’s throw away, his friend called out after him: “We’ll see.”
Friday Finds: A New WWB Series, ‘Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation’
“You cannot have people who regularly review American literature dictate the worth of a new work in translation. They do not have the range to deal with such works, simply because their reviews are often based on their local literary economies.”
Friday Finds: ‘I Sleep in My Inkwell and Wave to the Distant’
“of footfalls that never return / from the checkpoint / which only sends back bodies;”