’48 kg’: Creating Life from a Desire to Diminish and Fade Away
Gaza-based Palestinian writer Husam Maarouf responds to Batool Abu Akleen’s ’48 kg.’
Reviews
Songs of the Unspeakable
When can loss that never ends be said to have happened? When will absence finally finish arriving? Who is the self if left partial, displaced from identity to be found neither here nor there? And if loss defines us, when may we be ourselves?
On ‘Fighting Ideological Fantasy with Fiction’
Several authors who contributed short stories to the collection spoke about their thoughts on the collapse of time, historical continuities and the notion of fighting ideological fantasy with fiction.
A Single, Slow Exorcism: The Nakba Dreamed Backwards
From the very first lines of her introduction, editor Basma Ghalayani thrusts us right into a hurried, pulsing Gaza. A passerby asks a Gazan sprinting down the street if something has happened. He answers, “no, but it might.”
Muhammad Makhzangi’s ‘The Smell of the Sun’
“In Makhzangi’s world, existence unfolds through affection, love, and memory, all leading toward that last serene surrender. Death is therefore not an end but the ultimate form of belonging, the moment when everything returns to the vast, breathing rhythm of life itself.”
A Syrian Masterclass in the Art of Being Human
Ten months and six days after the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his regime, DoppelHouse Press released Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution, the eyewitness chronicles of nurse-turned-frontline-war-reporter Hadi Abdullah, ably translated by Alessandro Columbu.
An Exciting New Lebanese Voice, Now in French
This October will see the release of Lebanese writer Souhaib Ayoub’s second novel, Le Loup de la famille (The Wolf of the Family), in Stéphanie Dujols’ translation. Originally published as Zi’b al-‘a’ila in 2024 by Hachette Antoine/Naufal, the French publication is an event for several reasons, not least because an exciting new voice has arrived in French.
On ‘The Open Novelistic Corpus: The Art of Narrative Storytelling in Tayeb Salih’s Work’
The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month. BULAQ discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her.
On ‘Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide’
Nahil writes, “When women gather in one place, the conversation flows differently” and this is indeed exemplified by Voices of Resistance, a safe place where four Gazan women—along with the women translators Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat—are gathered together to share their reflections, fears, daily struggles, small wins, and moments of happiness.