Hala Salah Eldin Hussein — the editor of Albawtaka Review — says she will be issuing the “very first literary audio book in the Arab World,” 10,000 copies of a short-story collection that has been translated from English to Arabic. The stories will be voiced by prominent women authors and distributed free.
In a recent interview with the Centre for African Poetry, Egyptian novelist and “occasional poet” Youssef Rakha talked about the possibilities of greater contact between various African literatures.
George Packer has a column in the April 7 New Yorker about “how soldiers write their wars,” which should be re-subtitled: “how US soldiers write their wars.” Which stories are we hearing and which are singing into the abyss?
In the most recent Brooklyn Quarterly, Deep Vellum publisher Will Evans writes an impassioned essay that declares, “I Want You To Start Your Own Publishing House.”
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Earlier this month, Jonathan Guyer — of the blog Oum Cartoon — spoke at the American University in Cairo about Egypt’s ever-shifting red lines and the currently shrunken space for cartooning dissent.
In Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, there is a scene where the protagonist — a translator, and a lover of books — asserts that she is the only person in Lebanon to have copies of well-known international fiction such as Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” and Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.” What?
This is the second part of a two-part report on Ain Shams University’s two-day conference in honour of Professor Radwa Ashour. Contributor Amira Abd El-Khalek was there and captured some of the most striking moments, as when Ashour and her husband, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, talked about the responsibilities of writers.
In the last week in Britain, there has been a relatively loud roar over new-ish rules that restrict sending books (and underwear, among other things) to prisoners. But England is hardly the only place to strangle prisoners’ access to books.
