“Sharafeddine noted that publishers were hesitant to publish content that bent gender-normative expectations, or that broke grammatical rules or inserted colloquial terms into a generally standard-Arabic text.”
“The crowds at the KFAS booth were wild.”
In others, the narrator is the child-figure, or, in the case of the wonderfully satiric “Like a Domestic Animal,” a house pet: “My demands are basic: / some patting over my head/ and clemency for my horrible daily deeds.”
Samatar’s story, which plays with a story from the Arabic Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange, also pays tribute to al-Sabbagh, “the poet who wrote of the streets.”
The first of the papers, Egypt’s Podcasts and Booktubes: A Literary Criticism of the Future? is up at Maydan, with suggestions for your literary podcast and booktube pleasure.
“So Qays—thanks to his madness—became free not only from the power of the sultan and the tribe, but also—and especially—from the boundaries imposed on him by the transmitters of his story. We still find him stepping out and escaping, over and over.”
“Speaking of translation, I once went alone to a workshop in Montreuil without a translator, and so I used Google Translate to pull sentences together and I sketched with the kids and it went quite well for about two hours.”
It notes only that he was nominated by Shawky Deif.
“We absolutely want to make this festival work and to build on it, so that in 10 or 15 years’ time, people will perhaps look upon it in the way that the Colombians do with our festival in Cartagena.”
