News

This time it’s Cairo Modern, reviewed here (un-starred) by Publishers Weekly. Now I am about to agree with the Angry Arab News Service (Dr. As`ad AbuKhalil) and his assessment that […]

The IPAF (“Arabic Booker”)-sponsored retreat to Baniyas Island is over, and a few of the authors—including Egypt’s Mansoura el-Ezdin, longlisted for this year’s Arabic Booker—spoke with The National about their […]

Bikya Masr reports that Magdy el-Shafee and his publisher have been fined 5,000LE for the publication and distribution of Egypt’s first graphic novel, Metro. Apparently it offended public morals. You […]

We were in a stationary store a few month’s back—these sometimes double as book shops in Cairo—and my six-year-old son asked for a new book. Fine, we said. There were […]

Youssef Ziedan recently found himself in the position of defending the inrush of Gulf money into the arts. Organizations in the Gulf, particularly the UAE, have not just been pouring […]

That’s the headline from the UAE-based Khaleej Times, and it’s certainly the headline for me, too. I know almost nothing about Saudi literature, except that there have been a number […]

The last three stories in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology all struck me, although not as deeply as Khudayyir, Naqqash, or Shimon. Ibtisam Abdullah’s second story, “The Other in the […]

“The Street Vendor and the Movies,” the next story in the anthology that really hit me, is by Samuel Shimon. It’s excerpted from his An Iraqi in Paris—which I meant […]

The second gem of Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology is Samir Naqqash’s “Tantal.” There is only one story by him in the collection, although it’s a lovely one, about illusionment […]