News

At a recent Cairo literary event, my friend Yasmine P.—who has spent the last three years living in Jerusalem, and continues to travel back frequently to finish her documentary film—complained […]

From Reading Morocco: Reading Crisis Alarms Moroccan Writers. As it is here, so it is elsewhere. The quotes put the blame on readers, although I am not so sure the […]

No, it’s not irony. Nor is it a straightforward celebration of “police” and “security.” Not that security is necessarily a bad thing: I do applaud the Egyptian police for doing […]

There are five Egyptians on the “Beirut39” list, the celebrated 39 up-and-coming Arab writers under 40. They are: Hamdy el Gazzar, Mansoura Ez Eldin , Mohamed Salah Al Azab, Nagat […]

“I would like to see this fair not as a miniature version of Frankfurt, but as something in its own right.” Something more colorful, says Abu Dhabi Book Fair manager […]

That’s the School Library Journal’s assessment of the U.S. ALA convention: Graphic novels are everywhere, raining down from children’s-book publishers. And, of course, they’re not just for kids any more: […]

Hisham Matar, author of In the Country of Men, has a heart-wrenching piece in The Guardian about how his father—imprisoned since 1990—may yet be alive. “Too many facts. I am […]

A few of the big authors of the last decade (the Alaa el Aswany, the Elias Khoury) as well as the obligatory “taboo breakers” (Girls of Riyadh) are reviewed by […]

Sales of non-children’s, non-religious books were down this year, according to the Gulf Times. Bummer.