‘Dates on My Fingers’: Exploring and Challenging Traditional Masculinities
Reviewer Alexandra Atiya found a challenge to received ideas of masculinity in Iraqi novelist Muhsin al-Ramli’s “Dates on My Fingers” (2014), translated by Luke Leafgren.
Reviews
‘Diary of a Muslim Jew’: And Yes, That’s the Book’s Title
We have become so accustomed to thinking of religion as a place of singularity in human identity that Diary of a Jewish Musilm gives all the shock in translation that author Kamal Ruhayyim surely intended in the original.
‘Chronicles of Majnun Layla & Selected Poems’: A Different Kind of Crazy
It’s easy to see why Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden would choose the “Chronicles of Majnun Layla” as the centerpiece of their Qassim Haddad collection, which brings together work that spans the Bahraini poet’s career.
Mansour El Souwaim’s ‘The Last Sultan’: A Historical Paradox
Emerging Sudanese author Mansour El Souwaim has received a number of plaudits. He was named one of the “Beirut39” in 2009, one of the top 39 Arab authors under 40, won the Tayeb Salih award for his second novel, and was selected to participate in the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction nadwa. Souwaim has a new novel out, The Last Sultan, which Nassir Elsayed Elnour says “calls on us to rethink history.”
On an 81st Birthday: Why Does Abdelrahman Munif Not Make the ‘World Literature’ Canon?
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.
The Illusions of Intimacy and Reading ‘Other Lives’
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.
‘Life on Hold’: A Novel of Stalled Dreams in Saudi Arabia
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
A Golden Piece of Shit: ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’ on Morality and War
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.”
366: A Novel of Love and Crime, Beautifully Told
Tunisian poet Inas Abassi reviews Amir Tag Elsir’s 366, longlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction.