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This year, participants include Egyptian Khaled al-Berry, Kuwaiti author Taleb al-Refai, and Saudi Beirut39 laureate Abdullah Thabit, among others:

August is ending, beach season is coming to a close, and — huzzah — there’s a new blog in town: قصص أخرى (QISASUKHRA). It’s still rather spare, but promises “excerpts of previously untranslated Arabic literary works in English.” The first entry, titled “My Mother,” is a short story by Hamdi Abu Golayyel (his Thieves in Retirement and Dog With No Tail are both in English). There’s also new late-August fiction up on World Literature Today, Jadaliyya, and probably elsewhere:

UPDATES FROM EGYPT INDEPENDENT: “Journalist accused of insulting president released” and “Journalists, culture workers hold sit-in for freedom of expression” # A small number of protesters — including just 204  Facebook […]

Sarah Irving read Adania Shibli’s first book-length work, which was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, in one sitting. Irving calls the poetic novella a “startlingly real portrait of the world […]

Ahdaf Soueif had a short essay in the Guardian this Friday: “In times of crisis, fiction has to take a back seat”. To be fair, we should add that she tweeted “#Guardian title re #fiction far too simple. Not what I say.”

If you have a brilliant short story that you’ve thought about translating, consider contacting The Stinging Fly with a proposal.

Censorship in the newest new Egypt thus far seems to be functioning more or less like censorship in the Previous Egypt (when SCAF sat in the golden Louis IVX chair), as well as the Egypt before that.

Critic M.A. Orthofer should be pleased; in the interest of transparency and fostering greater interest in Arabic literature (in translation), there’s been a shift in the administration of the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

I just noticed a new interview with Palestinian writer Akram Msallim on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) website. Msallim’s Qattan-prize-winning 2008 novel, “سيرة العقرب الذي يتصبب عرقاً”, has been translated into Italian and into French. As far as I know, the novel does not yet have an English-language publisher. Meanwhile, at last month’s Hay Festival in Beirut: