Looking at the 2009 Arabic Booker shortlist (in translation) makes one wonder: What of 2008? Bahaa Taher’s Sunset Oasis, the winner of the inaugural Arabic Booker, became available in English […]
The winner of the Sheikh Zayed Award for Children’s Literature was announced (yesterday?). It’s the “Arabic-manga” series Gold Ring. I can’t quite tell what it’s about from this or this, […]
I assume that Ian Jack is exaggerating a bit when he speaks of the violent intimacies of European book fairs. Jack probably has not experienced the intimacies of the Cairo […]
I really don’t like it when organizations in the Middle East “unveil” something new. I realize there’s no subtext intended…but…. Anyhow, all seems in order (Yousef Ziedan and Bahaa Taher, […]
I’m working on an essay about Idris, the maestro of Egyptian short-story writing. This passage, in particular, resonated with me: “Renewal of writing is a natural, spontaneous and ingrained process […]
Novels may not be in every (Arab) hand, but poetry lives and breathes, particularly on the peninsula. This is not necessarily the poetry that one would recognize in the West—our […]
The greatest literary show on Earth, we’re not. The General Egyptian Book Organization calls it a “massive literary festival,” and oh, it’s massive all right. The fair’s at the International […]
Yamani, who apparently is traveling, is the Egyptian writer missing from Kotob Khan’s Beirut39 reading and discussion. Sousan Hammad has a new (short) interview with him on the Beirut39 blog. […]
Last night, I attended the Beirut39 event at Kotob Khan (bookstore, although it feels strange to write “Book store bookstore”). We did not get to know the authors’ weights and […]
