Today would have been Saudi-Iraqi novelist Abdelrahman Munif’s 81st birthday. Although a great craftsman of the 20th century Arabic novel, his literary legacy goes largely un-celebrated.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt myself burrow as deeply inside a character as I did inside Myriam, the narrator of Iman Humaydan’s “Other Lives,” translated into English by Michelle Hartman and recently released by Interlink.
A novel where the “days are all much the same, bringing nothing new” is a difficult thing to pull off. And Fahd al-Atiq’s “Life on Hold,” trans. Jonathan Wright, couldn’t be characterized as a page-turner. But the book does manage to craft a compelling narrative about the contradictions of contemporary Riyadh even as the protagonist remains stranded in nowhere-land
Al-Mustafa Najjar reviews Ahmad Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, longlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). Najjar calles it “a novel that suspends moral judgement.”
Tunisian poet Inas Abassi reviews Amir Tag Elsir’s 366, longlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
From a review in Full Stop Magazine: Rabee Jaber’s The Mehlis Report, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is a genre-bending historico-fantastical murder-mystery that moves the borders between life and death. The novel […]
Eslam Mosbah’s “إيموز”, trans. Raphael Cohen and published by AUC Press as Status: Emo (2013), has a wild, end-of-days atmosphere. Something is rotten in the State of Egypt, and change must be on the horizon.
Translator Ruth Ahmedzai, who worked on one of the excerpts of Mustafa Khalifa’s The Shell for the “And Other Stories” book group wants publishers to know how strongly she feels this book should be translated.
You’ve seen the VIDA count, which tracks how many books, of those reviewed in mainstream publications, were by women. Recently, over at The Nation, Roxanne Gay gave a shot at tracking how many nonwhite writers’ books were reviewed (including translations).
