The Latest

Saïd Khatibi’s I Resist the River’s Course — on the shortlist for the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), with a winner set to be announced online April 9 — chronicles half a century of Algerian history, from the Second World War to the early 1990s.

“Abu Shalakh, the Chameleon” is a 2002 fantastical, satirical novel by Ghazi Algosaibi (1940-2010) in which the Saudi literary giant and politician recounts the history of the Kingdom and its global entanglements through Abu Shalakh, a lovable liar, unreliable storyteller, and self-proclaimed “truth-teller.”

“He did not say goodbye when he rose to leave.”

“Who am I? / I am not myself.”

“They walk beneath the sky. As their arms extend. As they grow new arms. As they carry their children.’

“Are you tired of walking / My son, are you tired?”

Translator-scholar Jonas Elbousty talks with Roger Allen about his journey in the field of Arabic Studies.

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Elliott Colla look into two dimensions of translation, which Colla calls the solidaristic and the hegemonic, and the particular role translation has played in the US military.

“Sometimes, I believe that silence itself could carry meaning in the face of this barbarity. Sometimes, I tell myself that I’ll stop documenting atrocities and only write literature. But all of this only makes sense in the context of our desire for justice, our desire to preserve the true essence of humanity.”

“My book really is an examination of how he participated in the coup ,and how he believed fundamentally that the Free Officers were going to install democracy, and—once he realized that they were actually installing military dictatorship—the way he dissented, in the editorials and in person, the way that he was jailed, and the way he turned to fiction to express his dissent directly to Nasser.”