"I remember now Badr Shakir al-Sayyab - I see him in our house, with a group of friends, sitting on small straw chairs, sharing a table, or improvising a seat on the floor."
From BILA HUDOOD: An Excerpt of Charles Akl’s ‘Food for Copts’
"A study of Coptic school sandwiches â or how to get your mother to make you the best chicken sandwich in the world."
From the Archives: ‘Cooking with Naguib Mahfouz’
In honor of the "Kitchen" issue of ArabLit Quarterly, a re-run from 2016, about the history of sharkasiyya, a dish important in Mahfouzâs Palace Walk. This piece also ran on  kitchening … Continue reading From the Archives: ‘Cooking with Naguib Mahfouz’
Friday Finds: Celebrating Iman Mersal
But there's also much more of Mersal's work to explore online.
Friday Finds: Abdelfattah Kilito’s ‘Why Read the Classics?’
"Isnât our notion of the classic influenced by the other? Doesnât the standing of Arabic literature rely upon foreign literature?"
Ahmed Bouanani and Morocco’s Seventh Art
"It was the only book that Ahmed Bouanani wanted to publish, but he died believing that the manuscript had been destroyed when his house burned down."
Friday Finds: Excerpt from ‘My Motherâs Glasses, a Tunisian Prison Memoir’
"It was Friday, May 9, 1975. We had just ended a hunger strike a few days earlier."
Afro, Indigenous, and Palestinian Futurisms: Writing Across Space and Time
This is where M. Asli Dukan has arrived in her own work, as she moves away from the label of Afrofuturism towards a more unifying vision, what she has started to call âabolitionist futurisms.â
#PalestineWrites: Literature, Erasure, and Preservation
"Shukair stressed the important role Arab educational institutions play in keeping Palestinian literature alive."
What 1930s Egyptian Travel Writing Says About the ‘Arab Mediterranean’
"The interwar years were a golden age for travel writing in Egypt and the Middle East in general; scores of new books arrived to tell Arabic readers about the increasingly connected world."
Bilingual Writer’s Block in the Time of Covid
"In nature, some plants love to bathe in sunlight, others thrive in the dark, but nothing can grow on quicksand, and thatâs exactly where many of us writers are desperately trying to sow their creative seeds."
Friday Finds: ‘A Rot of Evidence’
"I thought these are crazy days. I have been in prison for a long time, and I have no idea whatâs going on. Maybe theyâre fabricating a case against Nagib Mahfouz or his ghost."