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.
Isabelle Mayault is editor-at-large for Uncommon Guidebooks, which has just come out with an Uncommon Dubai and has an Uncommon Cairo in production. What makes these guidebooks less-than-common is that they take a more literary, anecdotal eye on their city-subjects.
Al-Mustafa Najjar, who reviewed Ahmed Saadawi’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)-shortlisted “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” also interviewed the author, who talks about his novel, including about how, “The element of fantasy adds a touch of joy to the work, mitigating its cruelty.”
At the request of a reader, these are not just books by Iraqis published post-2003 (which would obviously include many more), but literary works that specifically comment on the post-2003 landscape.
Youssef Fadel’s “A Rare Blue Bird That Flies with Me” is on the six-strong shortlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Cristina Dozio reviews it, and finds time runs, in this evocative novel, runs in many different sorts of ways.
The Beirut-based magazine “The Outpost” — which focuses on “possibilities in the Arab world” — is crowdfunding its second year in print. ArabLit asked editor-at-large Ramzi Nasir and editor-in-chief Ibrahim Nehme about why it’s been called “a successor to the ‘Economist,'” the role of English, and why print isn’t dead.
