It’s seeming less and less like a world where English-language publishers can sit around for decades, dangling their toes in the water, knowing that the best in Arabic fiction will […]
The poem was originally broadcast on BBC Radio. “But that’s all over now. Or can you say over when it took 42 years?”
There are an unusual number of new translations of Arabic fiction, poetry, and memoir forthcoming this fall. Eleven I think are particularly worth ordering or pre-ordering: I Was Born There, I […]
Earlier this week, Egyptian author and activist Dr. Nawal al-Saadawi told BBC4 that she is at work on a new novel. When asked if the new novel would reflect events […]
I received two graphic novels in the mail of late. One, Bye Bye Babylon, is a pop-art-infused look at Beirut’s civil war by Lebanese author-artist Lamia Ziade. The other, Habibi, is an […]
NOTE: Vertigo has been named “best revolution read” of 2011. # I was reading the Robin Moger translation of Ahmed Mourad’s Vertigo last night, and was struck by the generational […]
Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing has signed with novelist Radwa Ashour to translate her novel Farag into English. The novel, originally published by Dar el Shorouk in 2008, has been perhaps Ashour’s […]
It was twenty-three years ago today that Naguib Mahfouz became the first—and thus far, only—Arabic-writing author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. This year is Mahfouz’s centenary, a year […]
After yesterday’s events, I haven’t the heart to write anything new about books. I did an initial read of Bye Bye Babylon and the juxtaposition of bright-colored mass-produced products and weapons […]
