Coming Sept 2026: Modern Classics and YA, Plus a Day of Translation
This month, we have books and events coming in September 2026, as well as one we missed from the end of August.
Sonallah Ibrahim
Sonallah Ibrahim, The Egyptian Novelist Who Captured History
The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month. BULAQ discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her.
Remembering Sonallah Ibrahim: His ‘Arsène Lupin’
Sonallah Ibrahim died this week at the age of 88. His “Arsène Lupin,” originally written in the al-Wahat Prison Camp, Western Desert, Egypt, in 1963, appeared in translation in the Summer 2020 CRIME issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
Towering Egyptian Novelist Sonallah Ibrahim Dies at 88
Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim — one of the great literary innovators of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — died today, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture announced. He was eighty-eight.
Summer Reads: Sonallah Ibrahim’s ‘Arsène Lupin’
“My father got dressed, brushed off his tarbush with the sleeve of his jacket, and placed it at an appropriate tilt on his head. Then he twisted the ends of his white mustache all the way up to his nostrils. We left the apartment, locking the door behind us, and went down to the street. I noticed we were heading toward the tram stop.”
Lit & Found: Hosam Aboul-Ela, Mona Kareem, and ‘Exportability & Context: Reading Arabic Literature in the West’
“It doesn’t feel like an Arabic novel any more to me, now that it’s translated,” Hosam Aboul-ela said. “it feels like a really unique novel of Marxist international revolution.”
On the Sonallah Ibrahim Renaissance
“I think there is also the question of who gets to write Egypt’s history, and who will maintain the archives and documents necessary to tell that history?”
Coming in August: Historical Fiction from Egypt and Libya & an Iraqi Memoir
Coming in August: Books by Sonallah Ibrahim, Ibrahim al-Koni, and Faleeha Hassan.
Coming in June: Historical Fiction & Animal Stories
Coming in June, three new books in translation by Egyptian authors.