There have been highlights (the launch of the new e-book store Kotobi.Com) and lowlights (detained journalists Fras Shamsan and Firas Mohamed) at this year’s Cairo International Book Fair.
It’s already a rough year for UK-based publishers who bring out translations from the Arabic. Last month, Quercus — which publishes Elias Khoury in the UK — put itself up for sale. This week, Saqi Books has announced that they’re looking for an investor.
ArabLit and 7iber continue coverage of this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) longlist – in English and Arabic — with Inaam Kachachi and “Tashari,” a word in the Iraqi dialect for being scattered and fragmented, as though shot from a hunting rifle.
Max Marin interviewed Iraqi novelist Inaam Kachachi — whose novel “American Granddaughter” was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2009 — about her IPAF-longlisted novel, “Tashari,” the reason she writes, and injecting adrenaline into literary writing.
This month, Words Without Borders launched its International Graphic Novels: Volume VIIII, which features an excerpt from Donia Maher, Ganzeer, and Ahmad Nady’s “The Apartment in Bab El Louk,” trans. brilliantly by Elisabeth Jaquette. The collaborative project is a gorgeous look at life in Bab El-Louk. Ganzeer answered a few questions about how it came about, and what he plans to do next.
The first of February apparently was Robinson Crusoe Day, with a plethora of activities, books, lesson plans and more being offered around the Internet, for readers small and not-so-small. It’s Feb 1 because that’s the day Alexander Selkirk — who may have been a key inspiration for Robinson Crusoe — was apparently rescued from the island of Juan Fernandez. Certainly, there are other possible models, among them a narrative by Ibn Tufayl that was “a sensation among intellectuals in Daniel Defoe’s day.
As we wait for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) shortlist February 10, we continue to look at the 16 novels on the longlist. Nesreen Salem reviews Ibrahim Abdelmeguid’s ‘Alexandria in a Cloud’, which closes out his Alexandria trilogy:
Egyptian writer Muhammad Aladdin is the author of five novels and three short-story collections. In 2011, Akhbar al-Adab chose him as one of the most important Egyptian writers in the new millennium, and, in the same year, The Millions called him one of the ‘’Six Egyptian writers you don’t know but you should.” He talks about his fifth novel, which is just out, “A Well-trained Stray.”
Arab- and Arabic-literature events going on around the world. Please add on below.
