New Short Fiction by Najwa Binshatwan: ‘Click Like’
“Iman is afraid that she’s going to lose her job to AI. I pray to God that it will be like the rest of the inventions, which came to the Arab world only after they’d grown old in their own worlds.”Continue Reading
‘The Common’ Issue 25 Launches Today with Kuwait Special Section
The Amherst, USA-based literary magazine The Common today launches its 25th issue, which features a special section of short stories and art from Kuwait.Continue Reading
Sunday Submissions: Stephen Spender Prize 2023
Submissions for 2023’s edition of the Stephen Spender Prize for for poetry in translation are now open. The Stephen Spender Trust writes: Translate ANY poem from ANY language into English, and win publication and cash prizes! Language lovers and budding poets of all ages are warmly invited to take partContinue Reading
Syrian Writer Haidar Haidar Dies at 87: ‘The Man of the Banquet and the Leopard is Gone’
Social media was flooded with tributes to Syrian writer Haidar Haidar, who died May 5 at the age of 87.Continue Reading
Lit & Found: Inaam Kachachi on ‘The Night Baghdad Fell’
” I am not even sure that for my generation the hope of a homecoming is still realistically there. However, a novelist cannot be constrained to the limitations of reality; a novelist has to have a hole in the wall to see the light of the day; a novelist needs to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel somehow, because this is the way for the novelist to keep on writing their narratives.”Continue Reading
New: A Monthly Newsletter for Publishing Professionals about Arabic Literature & Translation
Now we want to distill and share what we’ve learned — on a monthly basis — for publishing professionals. This will primarily be for publishers who are interested in works translated from Arabic, but also into Arabic.Continue Reading
Muhammad al-Maghut’s ‘Bleak Ink Sky’
“I am done / Smoke rises from my heart.”Continue Reading
Publication Day for ‘Shalash the Iraqi’
It’s publication day for Shalash the Iraqi’s series of posts — essays, short stories, satiric monologues, magical-realist sketches — translated to English by Luke Leafgren nearly twenty years after their first appearance online.Continue Reading
A Talk with Shalash, the Explosively Popular Iraqi Satirist
“After only a few days—let’s say less than the first week after the appearance of Shalash—he became a phenomenon that occupied public opinion. It was a terrible thing for me, to be influential in a way that I did not expect, and that I could not even imagine, in the sense that readers turned Shalash into their conscience and their exclusive voice.”Continue Reading