Saturday Links: IPAF Longlister Waciny Laredj at Bibliotheca, YA Wins Award at Beirut Fair, More
Yes, yes, they’re supposed to be Friday links. But so it goes.
News
Friday Links: Your Dose of Orientalism, Publishing Controversies, Graphic Novels, More
In the interest of “balance,” today we’ll be providing some good old-fashioned views of Arabs (in English) over here at ArabLit! First, the Guardian books blog has a post about […]
Which Arabs Read? Emiratis and Lebanese
And it may even be true—according to a new six-nation study published by the Ipsos Research Center—but these young Arabs with an appetite for reading are probably not Egyptians. A press release put out by the survey’s authors reminds us of our old rag of a saying: Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, Iraq reads.
Magdy Al-Shafee’s Banned ‘Metro’ To Be Unveiled At Festival of Mediterranean Comics
Arabic-Italian Translator Barbara Benini informs me that Magdy al-Shafee’s graphic novel Metro will be out in Italian at the end of the month. This, after a long road of bannings and fines for al-Shafee.
International Prize for Arabic Fiction Longlist Profiles: Mohammad Achaari
Mohammad Achaari, while known primarily as a poet, also writes fiction and administers culture. He was born in 1951 in Moulay Driss Zerhoun, Morocco.
Eid Links: Free Rafik Schami Download, Follow Colla through Palestine, Events, More
To celebrate (and promote, one would think) their new Rafik Schami release, The Calligrapher’s Secret, Interlink has sent out downloads of Schami’s essay on Arabic calligraphy, “What I Create Will Outlast Time: The Story of the Beauty of Arabic Script.” The essay—like Schami’s other works—is translated by the very-award-winning Anthea Bell.
Jordanian Bookshop: We Specialize in Censored Books
The LA Times has a piece today about Sami Abu Hossein’s small bookstore in Amman, dedicated to censored titles. And yet Abu Hossein is not at odds with the Jordanian government, the Times notes, which has announced that it would stop censoring books.
Friday Links: Facebook as the New Literature, Reviews, and Taha Hussein Defended
This may be the week of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, but the most delightful thing I read this week was Youssef Rakha’s “Virtually there,” in Al Ahram Weekly. (We’ll just blame an editor for the meaningless headline.)
PalFest 2011 Set for April
According to a post on PalFest’s Twitter account, “Our fundraising cycle for 2011 begins in earnest now.”