‘A Magical Dimension’
A prize-winning novel about family tension is set during a period of tumult in Tunisia.
Reviews
‘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 […]
‘Egypt + 100’: Fictions on the Future of Public Space
By M Lynx Qualey Each anthology of near-future fiction in Comma Press’s “Futures Past” series has had a distinctly different flavor. The stories in Iraq + 100, ed. Hassan Blasim, […]
The Story of a Poem: Refaat Alareer’s ‘If I Must Die’
By Salih J Altoma “And in Gaza and the West Bank, a new generation of poets persists. The most famous, of course, is Refaat Alareer, who was murdered by an Israeli […]
‘Maqam Kurd’: A Counterpoint of Fragmented Identities
By Mohammed Said Hjiouij Much like Kurdish music, which is dominated by the Bayat maqam—a blend of sorrow and joy—the first chapter of Maha Hassan’s latest novel, Maqam Kurd, is […]