On Batool Abu Akleen’s ’48kg’
As Hilary Plum writes in this review of ’48kg,’: “Abu Akleen is young, yet her book exceptionally renders a preternatural intimacy with death.”
Reviews
On Hiva Nebi’s ‘One-size-fits-all Blue Dress’
“In her debut novel One-size-fits-all Blue Dress, Syrian-Kurdish writer Hiva Nebi offers us a rare gem: a book that doesn’t simply tell a story, but draws the readers into a raw, intimate exploration of the self. While the novel’s focus is postpartum depression, it also captures the experiences of being a woman, of giving birth, of living in a war zone, and of being married yet unbearably alone.”
‘The Book of Sana’a’: A Short-story Collection of Farce, Tricks, Myths, and More
Gender-swapping tricksters, farcical hiring practices, detachable heads, and the serious science of speedbumpology populate the newly released Book of Sana’a: A City in Short Fiction, edited by Laura Kasinof and part of Comma Press’s Reading the City series.
‘A Magical Dimension’
A prize-winning novel about family tension is set during a period of tumult in Tunisia.
‘Lonely as a Crowded Room’
‘Lonely as a Crowded Room’: Wit, Love, Death and Everything in Between By Alia H. Salim Some novels grip you from the first page, not because they fit into […]
Why Did the Jumpers Leap? On ‘The Dissenters’
Why Did the Jumpers Leap? On Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters By Abdelrahman ElGendy Once, on an unassuming Cairo afternoon in January 2011, an Egyptian generation was touched by a dream […]
‘Daybreak in Gaza’
By Olivia Snaije “In this war who am I? To the world, it seems I am just a number, a person who is counted on a list of people displaced, […]
Karim Kattan, Imagining Eden
By Olivia Snaije Since October 7, 2023, Palestinian author and poet Karim Kattan, along with Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé, has been among the few literary voices on France’s intellectual horizon […]
A Look Back: Hussein El Sayyed’s ‘We Had Days’
Recently, the American University of Beirut unearthed and archived three novels by the late Palestinian author Hussein Al-Sayyed, all three originally been published by Dar al-Hayat. These newly archived novels […]