On Banipal’s ‘100 Best Arabic Novels’
“Usefully, the Banipal list is not just a list, but also includes brief introductions to both the works and their authors, as well as some contextualization.”
“Usefully, the Banipal list is not just a list, but also includes brief introductions to both the works and their authors, as well as some contextualization.”
In his essay yesterday about “State Culture, State Anarchy,” Elliott Colla very briefly touched on author Sonallah Ibrahim’s 2003 put-down of the Egyptian state cultural apparatus.
Last night at Cairo’s Manial Palace, Penguin International President Andrew Phillips and Dar El Shorouk Chair Ibrahim El Moallem formally signed themselves into a partnership that was more than a year in the making: a joint Shorouk-Penguin project that will bring out both Penguin classics and local titles in Arabic.
August Egyptian author Gamal al-Ghitani (Zayni Barakat, The Zafarani Files) announced last week that he’s rejected a nomination for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, or the “Arabic Booker.”
Re:Viewing Egypt, a book of photographs by Xavier Roy (pictured, with a copy) and text by Gamal al-Ghitani (Zayni Barakat, Zafarani Files), is now available in the U.K. from Haus Press.
In the last few days, a number of stories have seemed worth mentioning—but they’re stories about which I don’t have enough knowledge to comment. So I thought I’d do as others do, and make a list of links.
Gamal al-Ghitani is interviewed in this week’s Qantara, mostly on the topic of the latest legal wrangling over 1,001 Nights. With all due respect to a greater literary mind, I […]
All right, the dean of Arabic literature died in 1973, so I couldn’t have asked his opinion on the matter. And no, Taha Hussein did not appear to me in […]