“Every day I lie and say / I know this place. / My mother’s kitchen / brims with afflictions / I must pretend to befriend it / we all know it can have only one master / from its beginning to its end”Continue Reading

In honor of the “Kitchen” issue of ArabLit Quarterly, a re-run from 2016, about the history of sharkasiyya, a dish important in Mahfouz’s Palace Walk. This piece also ran on  kitchening modernity: By Anny Gaul In the first volume of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, Bayn al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk), we meet a family whoseContinue Reading