” I will never look at rain the same way I used to; the author talks about it as if it were a living being with a will, attacking the earth, and how it has an effect on the streets.”
“It reminds us of the colonial narratives advancing how the colonized people are in desperate need of saving.”
“But when it comes to war crimes in civil wars, what is judged as sinful, and what heroic?”
The comparison is both oddly specific and also strangely unhelpful: Blasim is “Iraq’s Irvine Welsh.” Yes, yes, Irvine Welsh is a name I should instantly recognize. But to be honest, I had forgotten why. Irvine, my brain said. Irvine, California? Worse, my brain had linked the name “Irvine Welsh” to novels and screenplays by the American writer Peter Hedges.
“The ugliness of reality has surpassed the imagination of our ancient poets, and where modes of torture and killing machines have overshadowed the most creative minds of filmmakers, it is futile to invoke the ancient muses.”
“I was also drawn to Fawwaz years ago because of her incredible work on historical biography – and I now have no hesitation in calling her massive biographical dictionary of women (published 1893-6) a work of feminist history.”
“In fiction, the Algerian Jewish woman and man still await the main role.”
“She takes issue with how literary contributions by Saudi female writers have been dismissed as belonging to a ‘chick-lit genre’ by offering a rereading of Saudi novelist Seba al-Herz’s ‘The Others.’ She invites us to think of the work as a critique of ‘secular nationalism and the secular-nationalist intellectual, which have hitherto framed the Arabic literary canon.'”
Emirati author and columnist Eman Al Yousuf has published two short-story collections and two novels, the latter of which, Guardian of the Sun, was co-winner of first prize at the 2016 Emirates Novel […]
