Author Samar Yazbek and translator Leri Price have been longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in the “Translated Literature” category.
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Fiction from the Magazine: Raghad Qasim’s ‘Hair or No Hair’
“The no-hair phenomenon certainly has a backstory. “
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Haifa Zangana on Translation as Revisiting the Past
“At the time of writing the novella, I was preoccupied with a question: Is there is free will? Naturally, this question led to others: And how does it fit in a socially controlled life? How can individuals who arrived to London, not by choice, escape the new constraints?”
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30 Reads: A Month of Algerian Literature by Women
“Of course, I do enjoy painting for you, right now, a slightly more calamitous situation than the one I actually face – I blame Algerian fiction’s long love affair with tragedies for my theatrics. But the truth is still harsh.”
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Rawan Maki’s ‘Waves of the Future’ / ‘أمواج المستقبل’
We “reclaim” land from water, taking back what was never given / We worship our own footsteps, replacing the water’s sheen
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Hilal Chouman’s ‘World of Dogs’
“The next day, he was watching a livestream on television when he saw his dream on the screen. The streets of Beirut were flooded with mounds of garbage. This was the first step, he thought. Next, the piles of rubble would appear, and the people would vanish, leaving the buildings deserted.”
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From BILA HUDOOD: An Excerpt of Charles Akl’s ‘Food for Copts’
“A study of Coptic school sandwiches – or how to get your mother to make you the best chicken sandwich in the world.”
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Poetry by Ra’ad Abdulqadir: ‘The Song of the Eternal Citizen’
“Angels don’t cook / Poetry is inedible / What will we eat today? Legends?”
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On Being Wanderers in a Cosmopolitan City: A Conversation with Wen-chin Ouyang
“Haifa is a friend, and translating her every day felt like having her close by all the time. Her stories are meditative. Translating her became a ritual for me. It got me through some of the darkest days of my life.”
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