#PalestineWrites: Literature, Erasure, and Preservation
“Shukair stressed the important role Arab educational institutions play in keeping Palestinian literature alive.”
Nonfiction
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 that’s 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 what’s going on. Maybe they’re fabricating a case against Nagib Mahfouz or his ghost.”
Classic Bulaq: ‘Love and Silence, Rediscovering Enayat al-Zayyat’
This week’s Bulaq is a re-run, the episode focused on Iman Mersal’s “In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat.”
Charif Majdalani Wins Prix Femina for ‘Beirut 2020: Chronicle of a Collapse’
Lebanese author Charif Majdalani has won a 2020 Prix Femina “special jury prize” for his “Beyrouth 2020: Journal d’un effondrement.”
‘Dear Tayeb Salih’
This letter originally appeared in the debut issue of ArabLit Quarterly: Beginnings, published in the Fall of 2018.
Friday Finds: Reem Khorshid’s ‘Experiencing the Sounds and Silences of Cairo’
“When the sound processor of my cochlear implant is switched on, I feel like I hardly know this place. I fail at all attempts to conjure the old sounds of my hometown as my brain now perceives them in a different way. The pitches, the frequencies, the tones, and the ranges now have offbeat qualities that have taken over the sounds of the past.”
Hawraa Al-Hassan on Reading Resistance and Collaboration in Iraqi Novels
“It is important to note that the state marketed the novels it sponsored (including the novels of Saddam) as belonging to Arab ‘resistance literature’; a corpus of works with a long tradition of anti-imperialist struggle in the Arab world.”