New Lit: Excerpt of Stella Gaitano’s ‘The Souls of Eddo’
This first Monday of Women in Translation Month, Sawad Hussain and Stella Gaitano share this excerpt from her novel The Souls of Eddo, winner of a PEN Translates Prize ...
Lock-in Lit Series: ‘The Big Battle of Mohandiseen’
"But after Ramadan, everything is permissible!" ...
From Ahmed Atallah’s ‘Mariam: A True Story’
"Mariam: A True Story" was written mostly in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, detailing the quiet love between a young Egyptian Christian man and an Egyptian Christian woman turned into a taboo by the society around them ...
Summer of Lock-in Lit: Hisham Bustani’s ‘Eyes without a Face, or: Waiting with Billy Idol in Jordan’
"And over there, where there are no children, grandmothers or earth, it also did not mean a thing to me. My real homeland is: waiting.” ...
Lock-in Summer of Lit: Hassan Abdel-Mawgoud’s ‘Crocodiles’ Laughter’
He asked her whether she’d seen his crocodile. She exhaled angrily ...
Lock-in Literature: Ali el-Makk’s ‘Forty-One Minarets’
"What about the one who called the mosque after himself and built a sky-scraping minaret? People said he built his wealth from dubious deals. Certainly, people’s gossip was endless." ...
Safia Ketou: The First Algerian Sci-fi Novelist of Post-independence Algeria
For Women in Translation Month, our Algeria editor writes about one of her favorite discoveries, whose La Planète Mauve et Autres Nouvelles should certainly be brought into English By Nadia Ghanem In six years of rummaging through Algerian literature, Safia Ketou’s sci-fi story "The Mauve Planet" remains my favorite find. Born Zohra Rabhi in 1944, Safia Ketou wrote children books, poetry (Citar Friends ‘Amie Cithare’), plays (Asma) and short stories. It is in her collection The Mauve Planet and Other Stories that I discovered her sci-fi inclinations. Ketou is probably the first contemporary Algerian novelist to have written science-fiction in French. I have come across no other Algerian novelists interested in sci-fi during this period, out of those who wrote in the French language, ...
Read an Excerpt from Badriya Albeshr’s ‘Thursdays Visitors,’ Newly Banned in Saudi
"The ministry of culture and information has withdrawn the book 'Thursday's Visitors'... and opened an investigation into the matter." ...
An Excerpt from Najwa Bin Shatwan’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-shortlisted ‘Slave Pens’
"Why scrape off my scabbed wound now, Haj Ali? Why prolong tales after the season of their telling has passed?" ...
‘Using Life’: A Novel Excerpt on Trial in Egypt
"On the way, the streets were washed over and empty of traffic. It's a holiday: perhaps the Islamic New Year, or Victory Day, or Revolution Day, or Saltwater Catfish Day. Whatever it was, the city looked drowsy and everyone was checked out." ...
