BULAQ | بولاق (Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey)

El-Rifae’s book Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution tells the story of a movement that mobilized in Egypt to protect female protesters from mob sexual attacks in 2012 and 2013. Based on interviews with friends and comrades, the book explores memory, truth, gender, violence, political organizing, trauma, and possible futures.

Show Notes

You can order the book directly from @VersoBooks.

Read an excerpt at Granta.

The book launches October 24 in New York City; there will also be events in Philadelphia and D.C. 

Follow Yasmin for updates about more events at @yasminelrifae.

More writing by Yasmin El-Rifae is available on Mada Masr.

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Egyptian graphic novelist Deena Mohamed talks about her debut urban-fantasy trilogy Shubeik Lubeik (“Your Wish is My Command”). A product of playful self-translation, it’s coming to English as a single volume. It will be unbottled by Pantheon (US) and Granta (UK) on January 10, 2023. 

Show Notes: 

While the US edition keeps the title “Shubeik Lubeik,” the UK edition will use a literal translation: “Your Wish Is My Command.”

Find more of Deena’s work at http://deenadraws.art and on Twitter and Instagram as @itsdeenasaur.

The Arabic originals were published by Dar Mahrousa and are available in the US through Maamoul Press.

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An earthquake inspired Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Agadir, published in French in 1967 and translated to English by Jake Syersack and Pierre Joris. Part playtext, part novel, part political essay, part poem, this insurrection of a book takes as its starting point the devastating 1960 earthquake that struck the Moroccan city. 

Show Notes: 

We also talked about a few recently published and forthcoming poetry collections.

Mohamed Stitou’s Two Half Faces, translated by David Colmer (Phoneme Media)

Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for This Unseen Thread, translated by Mona Kareem (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Ibn Arabi’s The Translator of Desires, translated by Michael Sells (Princeton University Press)

Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger’s Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press).

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Beirut writer Lina Mounzer reads from her essay “Waste Away: Notes on Beirut's Broken Sewage System.” We discuss the current situation in Lebanon and literature that looks at the worlds beneath our feet. 

Show Notes:

Lina Mounzer's “Waste Away” appears in The Baffler; a slightly modified version is set to be published next week in the anthology Tales of Two Planets, ed. John Freeman.

Saleem Haddad's “Song of the Birds,” in the anthology Palestine + 100, explores the problems of sewage at Palestinian shores. 

Rabee Jaber's Mehlis Report, translated to English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, tells the tale of two cities: Beirut above and Beirut below.

Mounzer's “Translating Trash” appeared last year in The Paris Review. Also, her “The Great Ponzi Scheme” predicted a Lebanese financial disaster in the New York Times last December.

Mounzer wasn't alone. This essay from 2017 -- “Abracadabra...broke” -- also saw a looming economic crisis. 

Ursula wrote about Lebanese protests last November in the NYR Daily: The Lebanese Street Asks: ‘Which Is Stronger, Sect or Hunger?'

Favorite Lebanese literary magazines Samandal and Rusted Radishes continue to publish, although RR is re-imagining their budget and fundraising possibilities. Keep an eye out for their Patreon.

*Editor's Note: Ursula incorrectly refers to a long-serving Lebanese prime minister. She meant Speaker of Parliament. Nabih Berri has held that position for nearly three decades.

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Guest hosts Rafael (age 11) and Milo (almost 10) take over this episode of Bulaq to talk about the evil aunts, time-traveling djinn, and scary checkpoints in the first book of Palestinian novelist Sonia Nimr's fast-paced fantasy trilogy: Thunderbird.

Show Notes

The first Thunderbird novel is available from University of Texas Press. The second is forthcoming this fall.

Educators interested in joining a launch event on Zoom with author and translator can sign up at the University of Texas website. Participants will get a free copy of the book!

Red Stars, by Davide Morosinottto, is available in Denise Muir's translation. You can find more about literature for young readers in translation at worldkidlit.wordpress.com.

Rafael's next editing project is Sawad Hussain's translation of Djamila Morani's The Djinn's Apple, forthcoming from Neem Tree.

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This episode looks at the Fall 2020 issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which focuses on cats: in contemporary Arabic stories, in erotic poetry, in medieval scholarship, in Egyptian art, in Palestinian politics, and more.

We read from:

Ghada Samman's “Beheading the Cat,” translated by Issa Boullata.

The poetry of Rasha Omran, in the issue in Arabic, French, and English.

Al-Jawbari's advice on avoiding criminals with cats, translated for the issue by Dima El-Mouallem.

We also focus on:

Karim Zidan's essay on cats in Egyptian art, “Felines, Fellahin, and Fortune Tellers.”

Hoda Marmar's essay-interview with Muna Nasrallah, the daughter of Emily Nasrallah and previous owner of the cat from Nasrallah's classic YA novel, What Happened to Zeeko?

The fifteenth-century encyclopedic text “Merits of the Housecat,” translated by David Larsen.

Layla Baalbaki's classic story “The Cat,” translated by Tom Abi Samra.

You can get a copy of the magazine at www.arablit.org.

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The Maqamat of Al-Hariri is a story collection from 11th century Iraq that showcases the Arabic language's dazzling, disorienting possibilities. Michael Cooperson received the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his ground-breaking translation. 

SHOW NOTES

This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world's most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.

Today's guest, Michael Cooperson was awarded the SZBA in 2021 in the category of Translation, for the book Impostures: A Rogue's Tale Translated Fifty Ways by Al-Hariri, translated from Arabic to English and published by the Library of Arabic Literature in 2020.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children's Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website: https://www.zayedaward.ae/en/translation.grant.aspx.

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We talk about the landscape and history of independent publishing in the region, our own experiences working for and launching publications, the conundrum of funding, and the magic of little magazines. 

Show Notes:

This episode is partly inspired by an exhibition at the MMAG Foundation in Amman: How to Reappear Through the Quivering Leaves of Independent Publishing

The exhibition was curated by the publishing platform Kayfa ta, founded by artists Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis 

Here is a review by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie of the same exhibition when it took place in Beirut 

The exhibition featured the work of the Post-Apollo Press, among others

Some of the contemporary magazines mentioned in this episode are: Rusted Radishes, Bidayat, Qadita, Ma3azef, The Public Source, Raseef22, Nejma, Mada Masr, 7iber, as well as comix collectives: Skefkef, Samandal, Toktok, Garage, Fanzeen, Lab 619

The Moroccan magazine Souffles, published from 1966 to 1971, was a hugely influential experiment 

Zahia Rahmani and other scholars at the French Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art have created an eye-opening archive of non-European critical and cultural magazines

City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut, by Robyn Creswell (2019) is “an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War” that focuses on the magazine Shi'r (“Poetry”) 

Another Lebanese magazine, Hiwar, was (in)famously funded by the CIA.

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This episode focuses on Driss Chraibi's The Simple Past (Le Passé Simple), a Moroccan novel about a very angry young man in revolt against his father's tyranny and the hypocrisies of his colonial education. Back in 1954, it was compared to an explosion – and it still packs a punch today. 

Show Notes:

The Simple Past was newly re-issued from NYRB Classics in Hugh A. Harter's 1990 translation, with a new introduction from Adam Shatz. Shatz's introduction is available online at the NYR Daily.

Excerpts from Chraibi's interview with Federico Arbós can be found at Fragmentos de la entrevista con Federico Arbós, El Mundo/La Esfera, 28/3/92.

This episode also references Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy and the father figure of Si Sayyed; Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club; and Tayib Saleh's Season of Migration to the North.

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Nazik al-Mala'ika was an Iraqi woman poet of great influence and renown through the 1940s, 50s and 60s. She pioneered new poetic forms and re-invented a heritage of feminine, emotional, elegiac poetry-making. We are joined by scholar and translator Emily Drumsta to discuss a new bilingual collection of al-Mala'ika's poetry, Revolt Against the Sun. The collection is coming out this month from Saqi Books in the UK and January 2021 in the US.

We read from:

“A Letter to Him,” from For Prayer and Revolution (1978)

“Cholera,” from Shrapnel and Ash (1949)“The Moon Tree,” from The Moon Tree (1968)

“Revolt Against the Sun,” from Night Lover (1947)

A few poems by al-Mala'ika online:

“Night Lover,” tr. Drumsta

“Revolt Against the Sun,” tr. Drumsta

From “A Song for Mankind,” tr. Drumsta

“The Train Passed By,” tr. Drumsta 

“New Year,” t. Rebecca Carol Johnson, on WWB

“Love Song for Words,” tr. Johnson, on WWB

You can see more about the book at saqibooks.com/books/saqi/revolt-against-the-sun.

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Poet, artist and translator Yasmine Seale is at work on a fresh translation of the Thousand and One Nights.

Show Notes: 

An abbreviated version of The Nights will be coming out in Fall 2021, in Seale's translation for W. W. Norton. The fuller Nights is currently set for 2023. You can follow the Nights Bot, with which Seale shares fragments of her translation, on Twitter. 

You can watch a recording of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2020 The Bookseller Webinar -The global influence of the Arabian Nights, with Richard van Leeuwen, Marina Warner, and Yasmine Seale, on YouTube.

You can read Seale's talk with Veronica Esposito, “Wild Irreverence”: A Conversation about Arabic Translation with Yasmine Seale,  in World Literature Today.

At the beginning of the episode Seale reads an excerpt from Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi's Ta'tir al-anam fi tafsir al-ahlam, which is featured in the DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, released December 15.

Seale also reads her poem “Conventional Wisdom,” which won the poetry category of the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb -- the Syrian writer who related the Aladdin tale to Antoine Galland -- will be out from the Library of Arabic Literature, in Elias Muhanna's translation, in May 2021. Seale has written the foreword to the first volume.

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We discuss a book that tells the stories of women who rallied to ISIS; one that focuses on a Franco-Moroccan family grappling with the end of colonialism; and a picaresque, satirical novel  from 1940s Egypt that has been recently re-discovered.

Show Notes:

Ursula's review of Guest House for Young Widows, a book about women who joined ISIS, appeared in the last issue of The Point magazine. It references a few other books, such as Dunya Mikhail's  The Beekeeper of Sinjar (which gathers the testimonies of Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS) and David Thomson's The Returned, about French jihadis.

Ursula's review of the Moroccan-French author Leila Slimani's latest novel, Le Pays des Autres, will be out soon in the New York Review of books. Slimani's The Perfect Nanny was an international best-seller; her new book is part of a planned historical trilogy set in Morocco.

Adel Kamel's long-forgotten, now-remembered classic Malim al-Akbar recently appeared in English as The Magnificent Conman of Cairo. A special section on ArabLit marks the launch.

Literary detective Mohamed Shoair is author of the acclaimed 2018 popular history Children of the Alley: The Story of the Forbidden Novel, which follows the story of Naguib Mahfouz's most controversial novel. A chapter of Shoair's book appears online in Samah Selim's translation.

Mahfouz talks briefly about the Harafish, his circle of literary friends, in Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate, 1994-2001, from conversations with Mohamed Salmawy.

Albert Cossery was a French writer of Levantine origin, born in Cairo. Although he settled in Paris in 1945, he set all his wonderful novels — about criminals, layabouts and would-be revolutionaries — in Egypt or the middle east. 

The crime issue of ArabLit Quarterly is available now.

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In this sponsored episode, we talk to Sheikh Zayed Book Award winner Dr. Muhsin Al-Musawi about his life-long scholarship on the 1001 Nights. 

Show Notes:

This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.

Today’s guest, Professor Muhsin Al-Musawi, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2022 in the category of “Arab Culture in Other Languages,” for his book “The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures.” Al-Musawi is a professor of classical and modern Arabic literature, comparative and cultural studies at Columbia University. He is the author of 39 books and the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature. 

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children’s Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae

Professor Al-Musawi’s biography and a description of his book can be found on the SZBA website.

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In this episode we explore the relationship between cooking and writing. With special guest Anny Gaul, we talk about the origins of national dishes such as couscous and koshary; medieval Arabic cook books; and representations of kitchens and cooking in Egyptian literature. 

Show Notes:

Anny Gaul's writing and recipes, including the one on “bad translations” of hummus are online at cookingwithgaul.com. She wrote about Egyptian koshary as the dish we need right now for Eater. Her article on Abla Nazira's famous cookbooks is here. Her analysis of the depictions of cooking, kitchens and happiness in Egyptian writing can be found in the anthology Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond. The essay on couscous from which she reads at the beginning of the episode can be found in the last issue of Arab Lit Quarterly. 

Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table: A Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook,  ed. and translated by Nawal Nasrallah and Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook, tr. Charles Perry, are both out in paperback this year. 

Many adapted recipes are available at Nawal Nasrallah's website, nawalcooking.blogspot.com.

The Library of Arabic Literature offers free Arabic-only PDFs of their works, including Scents and Flavors. 

This episode mentions the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's Zaat, in which the kitchen is a site of mishaps, set-backs and middle-class aspirations. 

Here are links to further recent writing in Arabic on food: 

CIC Collective Workshop, Taste of Letters

A historical essay in the Al Jazeera Culture Section

Novelist Nael El Toukhy in Mada Masr 

An essay on food in Ottoman era poetry

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The Book of Ramallah collects stories set in and around Palestine's administrative capital, which, Maya Abu Al-Hayat writes in her introduction, “represents this mirage, this glimmer of hope that isn't real, to many writers.”

Show Notes: 

Book of Ramallah, edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat, is available from Comma Press. You can read “Love in Ramallah” by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Mohammed Ghalaieny, at Bookanista. An excerpt from the introduction is available at The Irish Times.

An excerpt of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah, in Ahdaf Soueif's translation, is available at Penguin Random.

An except of Raja Shehaheh's Palestinian Walks is available through PBS.

“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” by Nathan Thrall, is at the New York Review.

The Present, directed by Farah Nabulsi and co-written by Nabulsi and Hind Shoufani, is streaming on Netflix.

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Translator Alexander E. Elinson joins us to discuss Yassin Adnan's Hot Maroc, a sprawling satire of contemporary Morocco. The novel, set in Marrakesh and online, follows the story of Rahhal Laouina, aka “The Squirrel,” who finds his voice as an anonymous internet troll – and then has it co-opted by the country's security apparatus. While it paints a bleak picture of the possibilities of political dialogue, journalism, and self-expression, the novel itself is testament to literature's ability to chart new imaginative territory.

Show Notes

Hot Maroc is available from Syracuse University Press in Alex Elinson's translation

You can read an excerpt of the novel at Asymptote.

Aida Alami contextualizes the novel at Middle East Eye.

Adnan talks about the inspiration for the novel in an interview with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

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In this episode we explore the relationship between cooking and writing. With special guest Anny Gaul, we talk about the origins of national dishes such as couscous and koshary; medieval Arabic cook books; and representations of kitchens and cooking in Egyptian literature. 

Show Notes:

Anny Gaul's writing and recipes, including the one on “bad translations” of hummus are online at cookingwithgaul.com. She wrote about Egyptian koshary as the dish we need right now for Eater. Her article on Abla Nazira's famous cookbooks is here. Her analysis of the depictions of cooking, kitchens and happiness in Egyptian writing can be found in the anthology Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond. The essay on couscous from which she reads at the beginning of the episode can be found in the last issue of Arab Lit Quarterly. 

Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table: A Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook,  ed. and translated by Nawal Nasrallah and Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook, tr. Charles Perry, are both out in paperback this year. 

Many adapted recipes are available at Nawal Nasrallah's website, nawalcooking.blogspot.com.

The Library of Arabic Literature offers free Arabic-only PDFs of their works, including Scents and Flavors. 

This episode mentions the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's Zaat, in which the kitchen is a site of mishaps, set-backs and middle-class aspirations. 

Here are links to further recent writing in Arabic on food: 

CIC Collective Workshop, Taste of Letters

A historical essay in the Al Jazeera Culture Section

Novelist Nael El Toukhy in Mada Masr 

An essay on food in Ottoman era poetry

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In 1993, the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal picked up an unknown novel by a forgotten writer from the 60s. And so began her long wanderings in search of Enayat El Zayat. El Zayat killed herself in 1963, four years before her book “Love and Silence” was finally published. Mersal's portrait of El Zayat is a remarkable work of research, empathy and imagination. 

Show Notes: 

This episode focuses on Iman Mersal's In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat (في أثر عنايات الزيات), published by Kotob Khan Books in late 2019.

The author Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-63) finished one novel, which was published in 1967. 

Love and Silence ‫(الحب و الصمت) ‬ was recently republished and is available on Google Play.

Al-Zayyat was also working on a second novel, based around the German Egyptologist Ludwig Keimar; you can read Isolde Lehnert on Keimar.

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We talk about Morocco's most infamous secret prison; about fathers and sons; about survivors who tell their stories and writers who borrow (or steal?) them. 

Show Notes: 

Johanna Sellman “Memoirs from Tazmamart: Writing Strategies and Alternative Frameworks of Judgment” gives an overview of the survivors' writing about Tazmamart through 2006.

In 1999-2000, Mohamed Raiss published an account of his experiences serialized in Arabic. It was translated to French and published in book form in 2011 as Skhirat to Tazmamart: Return from the Bottom of Hell.

Ahmed Marzouki's Tazmamart Cellule 10 (Tazmamart Cell 10) came out in 2000. There is also a more recent interview with him, translated to English, in Jadaliyya.

The account of  Ali Bourequat, In the Moroccan King's Secret Gardens (1998), is out of print. In 2000 Medhat Bourequat, another of the Bourequat brothers, published his account, Mort Vivant (Living Dead).

Tahar Ben Jelloun's Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (That Blinding Absence of Light) appeared in 2001 and was apparently based on a three-hour interview with Aziz Binebine, who wrote an open letter saying Ben Jelloun pressured him to talk and disavowed the novel.

Aziz Binebine's own testimony, Tazmamort, appeared in 2009. The English translation, by Lulu Norman, appeared this spring.

Binebine's brother, Mahi Binebine, has written a novel about their father, who was a favorite companion and court “jester” of Hassan II, and who disavowed his son when he was imprisoned, Le fou du roi. 

The Moroccan novelist Youssef Fadel features both the figure of the father/court jester and the prison of Tazmamart in his novels A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me and A Rare Blue Bird Flies With Me.

We discussed the devastating Syrian prison memoir The Shell, by Mustafa Khalifa; and we talked about Morocco's years of lead previously in this episode.

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We discuss some of our favorite books from the past year, and some titles we're excited to get our hands on soon. 

Show Notes

•     Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World, ed. Zahra Hankir 
•     Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, tr. Sinan Antoon
•     Palestine + 100, ed. Basma Ghalayini
•     Palestine as Metaphor, by Mahmoud Darwish, tr. Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché
•       Room 304 or How I Hid from My Dear Father for 35 Years by Amr Ezzat, tr. Nora Amin and Yasmine Zohdi
•     Souls of Edo, by Stella Gaitano, is available from Rafiki Printing and Publishing
•     Celestial Bodies, by Jokha al-Harthi, tr. Marilyn Booth; you can watch the clip from their CNN interview on Twitter.
•     Sentence to Hope: A Sa'dallah Wannous Reader by Sa'dallah Wannous, tr. Nada Saab and Robert Myers
•     Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide by Mohamed Elshahed
•     The Magnificent Conman of Cairo by Adel Kamel, tr. Waleed Almusharaf
•     Impostures by al-Hariri, translated by Michael Cooperson

·      In Pursuit of Enayat al-Zayat by Iman Mersal

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We discuss an acclaimed novel set during the first Palestinian Intifada and one inspired by a tiny, legendary bookstore in Algiers. 

Show Notes:

This year, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction—which went to Abdelouahab Aissaoui's The Spartan Court—and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award—which had winners in seven categories—both had awards ceremonies on YouTube. 

MLQ will also participate in the now-online Sant Jordi Literary Festival (April 23-25), having recorded discussions with Elisabeth Jaquette about her translation of The Frightened Ones (by Dima Wannous) and Sawad Hussain about her translation of Bab as-Saha, or The Passage to the Plaza (by Sahar Khalifeh). 

Khalifeh's classic 1990 novel The Passage to the Plaza is newly out in English from Seagull Books.

Kaouther Adimi's Our Riches, translated by Chris Andrews, is also newly out from  New Directions; it follows the story of Edmond Charlot  and Les Vraies Richesses bookshop in Algiers.

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Our guest this week was once told there were no Algerian crime novels. She begs to differ. We discuss the many examples of the genre and its evolution in Algeria, Morocco and Egypt. 

Show Notes:

Nadia Ghanem regularly covers Algerian and Moroccan literature -- particularly crime fiction -- for ArabLit. She has a wonderful crime-lit overview, "The Story of 50 Years of Algerian Crime Fiction in 60+ Books," and also a short translation of a work by Chawki Amari, ‘Murder at Algiers' Book Fair'.

A few of Nadia's favorite Algerian crime novels: Adel s'emmele by Salim Aissa (ENAL editions, 1988), Kharidj el-Saytara (خارج السيطرة) by Abdelatif Ould Abdellah (El-Ikhtilef editions,  2016), Sakarat Nedjma (سكرات نجمة) by Amel Bouchareb (Chihab editions, 2015), 1994 by Adlene Meddi (Barzakh editions, Algeria, also released in France by Rivage editions in 2018), La prière du Maure by Adlene Meddi  (Barzakh editions, 2008), Le casse-tête turc by Adlene Meddi (Barzakh editions, 2002).

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul. He has written many books, including a series of brilliant detective novels, which have also been translated into English. 

The Moroccan writer Driss Chraibi's Inspector Ali is the hero of his acclaimed detective novels. 

The 2017 Egyptian noir film The Nile Hilton Incident take place just before the outbreak of the Arab Spring in Cairo. 

Nael Eltoukhy, author of Women of Karantina (tr. Robin Moger), wrote "Some Advice on Avoiding Censorship" for the Summer 2020 crime-themed issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

Ahmed Mourad's Vertigo, also tr. Moger, follows a story of crime and corruption through a photographer-sleuth's lens.

Elias Khoury's White Masks is his only murder-mystery; it has been translated by Maia Tabet. 

Several of Abdelilah Hamdouchi's crime novels have been translated and published by Hoopoe.

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Ursula Lindsey and Marcia Lynx Qualey discuss books from across the Arab region and new translations from Arabic.

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Two very different Egyptian novels – Hamdi Abu Golayyel's The Men Who Swallowed the Sun and Mohamed Kheir's Slipping – both circle around issues of migration in different ways. Abu Golayyel's Men (originally The Rise and Fall of the Saad Shin), translated by Humphrey Davies, is an anti-epic epic told in a rough, powerful storyteller's voice, following men as they move from Egypt to Libya and Italy. Mohamed Kheir's Slipping, translated by Robin Moger, is a beautifully crafted sonic landscape of appearances and disappearances.

Show Notes

An excerpt of The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is available at the Hoopoe Fiction website.

“The practice and culture of smuggling in the borderland of Egypt and Libya,” by Thomas Hüsken, is available on the Chatham House website.

An excerpt of Slipping appeared at LitHub.

Abu Bakr Khaal's novel African Titanics, translated to English by Charis Bredon, is available from Dar al-Saqi and Darf Books.

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Emma Ramadan translated two Moroccan novels in 2020: A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa & Straight from the Horse's Mouth by Meryem Alaoui. They are very different books but they both feature sex workers.

Show Notes:

Find more about Emma's current and forthcoming translations at emmaramadan.com/translations-1

The Moroccan film Much Loved was released in 2015. You can read more about it from Aida Alami: Moroccan Film About Prostitution Creates Uproar.

Najat Bensalem starred in the film Raja in 2003 and was the subject of Abdellah El Jouahary's documentary Raja Bent El Mellah, which came out in 2015.

Emma's co-translation, with Chris Clarke, of Abdellah Taïa's "The Rain"

Also Taïa's "A Garden, While Waiting," which Emma translated for the PEN World Voices Translation Slam

“Crossing Boundaries: 10 Moroccan Writers” - the special section Emma put together for Words Without Borders

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Mona Kareem's essay “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations” lit up debates among translators and poets. In this episode Kareem talks about poetry, the power dynamics of translation, and the relationship of both to migration, exile, self-censorship, and publication. She also reads from her poetry, both in her own translation and in translation by poet @SaraFarag.

Essays by Mona Kareem

Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations 

Bidoon: A Cause and Its Literature Are Born  

Mapping Exile: A Writer's Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait

Self-translation Never Lands

Poetry by Mona Kareem

Eleven poems on Poetry International 

Three poems in The Brooklyn Rail

More at Mona's website, monakareem.blogspot.com/search/label/Poetry

Ahmed Naji's essay Taming the Immigrant: Musings of a Writer in Exile 

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Twenty years after the disastrous and mendacious US invasion of Iraq, we take a look at writing from Iraq: memoirs, poems and blog posts. Shalash the Iraqi is a collection of such posts – a satirical, surreal, and affecting panorama in life in a Shia suburb of Baghdad in the early years of the occupation. 

Show Notes:

An excerpt from Gaith Abdul-ahad’s memoir A Stranger In Your Own City ran recently in the Guardian

Shalash The Iraqi, trans. Luke Leafgren, is a collection of blog posts written in 2005-2006 

An excerpt from Faleeha Hassan’s memoir War and Me, tans. William Hutchins ran on Arablit.org.

The Book of Trivialities, by Majed Mujid, trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid

The only English-language collection of Sargon Boulous’ self-translated poetry is Knife Sharpener from Banipal Books. You can find a list of his poems available online here. 

You can make a donation to support BULAQ's 2023 season here: https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq

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Show notes

• In the Spider’s Room, by Mohamed Abdelnabi, was on the shortlist for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The novel has been translated by Jonathan Wright and is forthcoming from Hoopoe, an imprint of AUC Press, in 2018. You can read reviews on Mada Masr as well as the much-shared critique on “Notes from Over There.”
• The Apartment in Bab El Louk, by Donia Maher, Ganzeer, and Ahmed Nady was published in Arabic in 2014 and appears in English this month, November 2017, from Darf Publishers, translated by Lissie Jaquette.
• Ahmed Naji was recipient of the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award after his imprisonment on charges of “violating public modesty” for an excerpt from the Egyptian edition of Using Life, published in Akhbar al-Adab. University of Texas Press is releasing the English translation, by Ben Koerber, November 20. More about Naji’s ongoing trial from PEN America.
• Magdy al-Shafee’s Metro was first published in January 2008 and quickly banned on the ground of “offending public morals”; al-Shafee and his publisher were both fined. An English translation by Chip Rosetti was published in June 2012, and the book—in English and Arabic—is now available in Egypt again.  
• The winner of the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, in the Young Adult category, was Fatima Sharafeddine’s Cappuccino. Yasmina Jraissati can be contacted about translation rights. There were several other fantastic shortlisted works, including Sonia Nimr’s Thunderbird and Taghreed Najjar’s One Day the Sun Will Shine. 
• Thursday’s Visitors by Saudi novelist Badriya Albeshr was the target of trolls and then a banning in Saudi Arabia. You can read an excerpt at ArabLit.
• Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who has been in prison or under house arrest for more than two years for a poem, has her next trial date November 9. You can follow her case at freedareentatour.org/trial. The poem, which is alleged to be incitement, is "Resist, My People, Resist Them." 

Books mentioned in this podcast

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In which we discuss the fictional underworlds of Rabee Jaber and other Lebanese novelists; and explore Saudi poetry, from a new translation of a famous pre-Islamic collection to the satirical poems of “a grumpy old man” in the Najd in the 18th century. At this time when women are denouncing male abuses of power the world over, we look at two Moroccan female writers who are critical of their societies and who face the question of how their work is received and represented at home and abroad. Asma Lamrabet proposes a progressive feminist re-reading of the Quran; Leila Slimani is an award-winning novelist who has written a book on “sexual misery” in Morocco.  

Show notes:

• Beit Beirut cultural center is in the restored Barakat building, built in 1924, devastated during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and used as a vantage for snipers.
• Rafic Hariri is the father of current Lebanese yes-no-yes-I’m-the-prime-minister Saad Hariri, and was assassinated in an explosion on February 14, 2005, along with twenty-one others. His assassination was the focus of a UN special tribunal.
• The Mehlis Report, by Rabee Jaber, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is set in the Beirut of the living and the dead in 2005, just before the release of the titular UN report, overseen by public prosecutor Detlev Mehlis.
• Confessions, by Rabee Jaber, also translated by Abu-Zeid, won this year’s PEN USA translation prize, and is told by a man who was raised by those who killed his family during Lebanon’s Civil War.
• Limbo Beirut, by Hilal Chouman, translated by Anna Ziajka Stanton, was published by University of Texas Press.
• It was also Kareem James Abu-Zeid who won a $25,000 NEA grant this week to produce a new translation of the Mu‘allaqat, or “The Hanging Poems,” a collection of works by seven pre-Islamic Arabic poets (although Abu-Zeid will be bringing together works by ten pre-Islamic Arabic poets).
• Arabian Satire: Poetry from 18th Century Najd, by Hmedan al-Shwe’ir, edited and translated by Marcel Kurpershoek, will be out December 1 from the Library of Arabic Literature. We read from Poem 19, which begins, “Our plowmen labored in the fields / while he was distracted by little Sarah.”
• The collection Adrenaline, by Ghayath al-Madhoun, translated by Catherine Cobham, is out this month from Action Books.
• Asma Lamrabet has been the Director of Studies and Research Centre on Women’s Issues in Islam of Rabita Mohammadia des Ulemas located in Rabat, Morocco since 2011. As it says on her website, “she focuses on rereading Holy Scriptures from a feminist perspective.” In English, you can read Women in the Qur'an: An Emancipatory Reading, translated by Myriam Francois-Cerrah. She recently won Le Prix Grand Atlas for Islam et femmes, les questions qui fâchent.
• Lullaby, by Leila Slimani, which won the Goncourt as Chanson douce, will be out in English translation by Sam Taylor in January 2018. Her new book is Sexe et mensonges. Ursula has a piece on Slimani here.
• Veil, by Rafia Zakaria, was published as part of the “Object Lessons” series from Bloomsbury. You can read M Lynx Qualey’s review on The National (UAE).
• Nawal El Saadawi has dozens of books available in English, including Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and Woman at Point Zero.
• You can message us at @bulaqbooks, where our DMs are open, or email at bulaq@arabist.net. 

Books mentioned in this podcast:

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Show notes

• Raja Shehadeh is a Ramallah-based author and attorney who has written a number of celebrated books, including Strangers in This House (2002), Palestinian Walks (2008), winner of the Orwell Prize; A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle (2010), and the book that was at the focus in this episode, Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine (2017). Ursula wrote recently about his life and his work for The Nation
• The Palestine Festival for Literature, created by writers Adhaf Soueif and Omar Robert Hamilton, brings authors, bloggers and journalists from around the world to Palestine every year. You can learn about it here: http://palfest.org
• Ibrahim Nasrallah is a prolific Jordanian-Palestinian poet and novelist who has won numerous awards. His Time of White Horses, translated by Nancy Roberts, was shortlisted for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and his Gaza Weddings, also tr. Roberts, has just been released in English. An excerpt is available online.
• The Drone Eats With Me, by Atef Abu Saif, was written during the summer of 2014, when Gaza was under siege. Abu Saif did a 2015 residency in London through the Delfina Foundation.
• Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness was translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who has a gift for finding the rhythms in Darwish’s prose.
• Mazen Maarouf, Palestinian-Icelandic poet and short-story writer, won the inaugural Almultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story in 2016 for his Jokes for the Gunmen, forthcoming in Jonathan Wright’s translation from Portobello Books. This year’s prize, announced December 4, went the Syrian author Shahla Ujayli’s Bed of the King’s Daughter.  
• Sam Wilder’s luminous translation of Ghassan Zaqtan’s Describing the Past was, disappointingly, not on this year’s four-book Banipal Translation Prize shortlist.  
• Palestinian authors have also been leaders in the new movement toward Arabic Young Adult literature. Sonia Nimr is a past winner of the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, in the Young Adult category, and Palestinian YA writer Ahlam Bsharat has also been shortlisted. Bsharat’s Code Name: Butterfly was translated by Nancy Roberts and shortlisted fort this year’s Palestine Book Awards. The two other Arabic YA novels that have been translated into English are Fatima Sharafeddine’s Faten, translated by the author as The Servant and Emily Nasrallah’s What Happened to Zeeko, translated by the late Denys Johnson-Davies. Other works discussed include Rania Amin’s Screaming Behind Doors, winner of the 2016 Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature in the YA category, Sonia Nimr’s Thunderbird and Taghreed Najjar’s One Day the Sun Will Shine, Sitt al-Koll, and Mystery of the Falcon’s Eye. 
• It was 2003 when Sonallah Ibrahim famously and publicly turned down the Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s 100,000LE State Prize, saying that the government hadn’t the credibility to grant it. 
• Sidewalk Salon is the book of 1001 Cairo street chairs. Marcia was incorrect; editors raised half of their $19,000 crowdfunding goal.

Books mentioned in this podcast

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Show notes

• ArabLit's "Arab Authors' Favorites of 2017" list is available online. Some of the most frequently mentioned books on the list were works of non-fiction: Haitham al-Wardany's Book of Sleep, Iman Mersal's How to Heal: Motherhood and Its Ghosts, and Charles Aql's Coptic Food.
• A translation of Mersal's book was funded by Mophradat as part of their Kayfa Ta series and brought to English-language life by Robin Moger, although the publisher is still TBA.
• Maan Abu Taleb's All the Battles was also translated by Robin Moger.
• Zeina Hashem Beck's poetry collection Louder than Hearts was one of MLQ's biggest discoveries of 2017.
• Ezzedine Choukri Fishere's Embrace at Brooklyn Bridge, translated by John Peate, was one of the underappreciated novels of 2017. Fishere's Exit Door has been signed by Hoopoe Fiction, and an excerpt from Fishere's 2017 novel All That Rot, translated by Jonathan Smolin, appeared at Words Without Borders.
• Omar al-Akkad's American War has already been translated to Arabic and published by the UAE-based Rewayat.
• American War was on the list of 2017 books of note Ursula made for the web site Al Fanar. Also on the list, Bad Girls of the Arab World, a collection of scholarly writing and essays edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas, published by University of Texas Press.
• Mustafa Khalifa's devastating prison novel The Shell has been translated by Paul Starkey and was published by Interlink.
• "The Fine Art of Learning to Say Nothing in Arabic," by Adam Valen Levinson, excerpted from the Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah and recently published on LitHub, has come in for considerable criticism online.
• On the other hand, there is writing about learning Arabic that we have loved: "Matthew McNaught's Yarmouk Miniature," published in N+1; Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land; and I.Y. Kratchovsky's wonderful Among Arabic Manuscripts, translated from the Russian by Tatiana Minorsky.
• The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature was presented on December 11 to Palestinian novelist, poet, and short-story writer Huzama Habayeb, for her 2016 novel Velvet. You can read a short profile and interview with the author in The National.

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In this episode of BULAQ we highlight several new and forthcoming translations from Arabic to English. We also discuss the newly translated Concerto Al Quds by the renowned Syrian poet Adonis, as well as Adonis’ own status as an artist and public intellectual, and his stance on religion and revolution.

Show notes

ArabLit’s list of works forthcoming in translation Winter-Spring is available online. Do keep in mind that, with smaller publishers, release dates can shift.

Banthology, ed Sarah Cleave, part of Comma Press’s “banned nations showcase,” is appearing this January 2018 in the UK, and from Deep Vellum in the US in March. The stories are by Anoud (Iraq), Wajdi al-Ahdal (Yemen), Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (Somalia), Najwa Bin Shatwan (Libya), Rania Mamoun (Sudan), Fereshteh Molavi (Iran) & Zaher Omareen (Syria).

The Iraqi author Hassan Blassim has published several collections of stories with Comma Press, and edited the collection Iraq +100.

Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright, is forthcoming from Penguin Random this month, as we celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. It won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Arwa Salih’s Stillborn, translated by Samah Selim, is forthcoming from Seagull Books this month.

Jabbour Doauihy’s Printed in Beirut is forthcoming from Interlink this March, in Paula Haydar’s translation. His great liar-narrator referred to is Eliyya in June Rain (also translated by Haydar) and the Christian-Muslim confusion is in his Homeless, sometimes translated as Chased Away.

Pearls on a Branch: Tales From the Arab World Told by Women, collected by Najla Jraissaty Khoury, translated by Inea Bushnaq, is forthcoming from Archipelago. Used copies of Bushnaq’s delightful Arab Folktales, published in 1986, can still be found.

Concerto al-Quds, by Adonis, translated by Khaled Mattawa, was released this month by Yale University Press. Two essays we mentioned were “The Man Who Remade Arabic Poetry,” by Robyn Creswell, and Sinan Antoon’s “The Arab Spring and Adonis’s Autumn.” You can also read Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s response to Antoon’s essay, and Antoon’s critique of Mattawa’s previous translation, Adonis: Selected Poems.

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Show notes

• Youssef Fadel’s “Moroccan trilogy” will appear from Hoopoe Fiction. They have already brought out A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me (translated by Alexander Elinson) and A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me (translated by Jonathan Smolin), and Elinson is at work on the novel Farah, which would translate to Joy, but will instead be translated as A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me.
• Mahi Binebine’s Le Fou du Roi (The King’s Fool) is, like A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me, inspired by the figure of Hassan II’s court jester, Binebine’s father, as well as Binebine’s brother, who was imprisoned in the infamous Tazmamart prison. Aziz Binebine is one of a number of former Tazmamart prisoners to have written memoirs. His is Tazmamort.
• Yassin Adnan’s Hot Maroc was longlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and is currently being translated by Alexander Elinson.
• The ArabLit Story Prize is currently raising funds for its first edition.
• The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) released its 2018 longlist on Wednesday, January 17. Many of the novelists are well-known authors; eight have been on previous IPAF longlists. The longlisted novel The Baghdad Clock, by Shahad El Rawi, has already been translated by Luke Leafgren and will appear in April from Oneworld. Amjad Nasser’s Here is the Rose has been longlisted; his previous novel, Land of No Rain, was beautifully translated by Jonathan Wright. The shortlisted The Frightened Ones, by Dima Wannous, is already out in Italian translation, Quelli che hanno paura.
• Sonallah Ibrahim’s famous refusal of the Arab Novel Award from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture is discussed in this profile.  
• Yasmine Seal’s article, “After the Revolution,” about three Egyptian novels she considers dystopian, in Harpers’ magazine.
• It was Robin Moger who asked us to stop describing so much Arabic literature as “dystopian.” The (maybe-sometimes-dystopias) discussed were Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; Ezzedine Choukri Fishere’s No Exit; Mohamed Rabie’s Otared, translated by Robin Moger; Ahmed Naji’s Using Life, translated by Ben Koerber; Nael El-Toukhy’s Women of Karantina, translated by Robin Moger; and Ahmed Khaled Towfiq’s Utopia, translated by Chip Rossetti.

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We discussed our recent readings. This includes some early foreign reporting on Morocco, which is both vivid and prejudiced; a moving account of the way Moroccan political prisoners clung to their memories and their words and refused to be fully “disappeared” during the country’s decades of repression; and a collection of beautifully translate and unusual folktales, shared by Lebanese women with each other. We also discussed the Cairo Book Fair, whose official theme this year is “Soft Power…How?”

Show notes

• Walter Harris’s (1866-1933) Morocco That Was is the book Ursula is considering “hate-teaching”. Harris was a British journalist and socialite who worked as a correspondent for The Times. The book can be read
• The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco by Susan Slyomovics looks at the words (literary and otherwise) that sent Moroccans to jail during the Hassan II years; the attempts to make peoples and their stories disappear; and the words that eventually exposed the terrible abuses of the “Years of Lead.”
• The Return by Hicham Matar explores secret prisons in Libya under Ghaddafi, in search of a trace of the author’s kidnapped father.
• Pearls on a Branch, by Najlaa Khoury, tr. Inea Bushnaq is forthcoming from Archipelago books March 2018. This ridiculously delightful folktale collection is based around work Khoury collected in Lebanon during the civil war, many of which became stage productions. A collection of them was published in Arabic in 2014, and soon they’ll be available in Bushnaq’s fun, luminous, inventive translation.
• Moroccan Folktales, ed. Jilali El Koudia, translated by Jilali El Koudia and Roger Allen with a critical analysis by Hasan M. El-Shamy, is newly available as a paperback from Syracuse University Press this February 2018.
• The Cairo Book Fair runs this year through February 10, 2018.
• “The Rise and Fall of Egyptian Arabic” can be found on The Economist.
• Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi’s ominous recent speech. Sisi is running for a second term against just one other candidate, who turns out to be a great fan of his.

"He had electoral tendencies and wanted to nominate himself.
But, thank God, he's back to feeling better!!"@abdalla_cartoon in today's Al-Masry Al-Youm, the privatey-owned Egyptian paper, where the jokes on the forthcoming presidential balloting have been riotous. pic.twitter.com/snyE7NKeqv

— Jonathan Guyer (@mideastXmidwest) January 30, 2018

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Show notes

• Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq is coming out in March 27, 2018 from US publisher New Directions and as The Beekeeper of Sinjar from the UK’s Serpent’s Tail in August 2018. Both were translated by Dunya Mikhail and Max Weiss. 
• Les Revenants: Ils étaient partis faire le jihad, ils sont de retour en France was written by David Thomson and won the Prix du livre Albert Londres in 2017.
• Historian Omar Mohammed is the force behind Mosul Eye, an independent writer who documented what was happening in Mosul during Daesh’s occupation. He wrote anonymously for three years before revealing his identity in December 2017 and can still be followed at @MosulEye and @omardemosul. One of Mosul’s libraries re-opened this month.
• Omar Mohammed was interviewed by Al Fanar’s Gilgamesh Nabeel.
• The Casablanca International Book Fair is going on now through Feburary 18, with Egypt as a guest of honor.
• The shockingly dull collection Essays of the Sadat Era: The Non-fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz: Volume II was recently released by The Gingko Library and is being distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press.

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Show notes

• Hisham Aidi's lovely portrait and critical re-evaluation of Juan Goytisolo was published by MERIP “Juan Goytisolo: Tangier, Havana and the Treasonous Intellectual.” For non-subscribers (and everyone should consider supporting this excellent publication!), a version can be found on academia.edu. And here is Aidi’s piece in The Nation: “Is Morocco Headed Toward Insurrection?”
• Ursula also recommends Aidi’s Rebel Music (2014) which she wrote about here.
• Rafia Zakaria penned “In Praise of Negative Reviews.” It references both Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which ran in Harper’s in 1959 and Kristina Marie Darling’s more recent “Readerly Privilege and Textual Violence: An Ethics of Engagement.”
• Marcia has written on Arablit about John Updike’s infamous dismissal of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, from a time when negative reviews of Arabic literature were more than common.
• The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (“Arabic Booker”) shortlist was announced on February 21. The biggest controversy was around the inclusion of Shahed al-Rawi’s The Baghdad Clock, which is forthcoming in translation by Luke Leafgren in May (US) and June (UK).

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Show notes

• The Asymptote interview with MLQ, conducted by Claire Jacobson.
• On voices at various margins: Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz (recently re-translated by Humphrey Davies); Kamal Ruhayyim’s Muslim Jew trilogy (tr. Sarah Enany); the film Marock;  The Others by Seba al-Herz.
• There is a video of Adam Talib's talk "Translating for Bigots" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aANKpO4zmGA
• Baghdad Noir, ed. Samuel Shimon, is forthcoming from Akashic Books later this year. You can already get Tehran Noir, ed. Salar Abdoh, who has a story called “Baghdad on Borrowed Time” in Baghdad Noir.
• More on noir: The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz, tr. M.M. Badawi and Trevor Le Gassick, revised by John Rodenbeck; Vertigo by Ahmed Mourad, tr. Robin Moger; Metro, by Magdy Shafie, tr. Chip Rossetti; the noir of Algerian-French author Jérémie Guez; Apartment at Bab el-Louk, by Donia Maher, ill. Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette; the films The Nile Hilton Incident and Casanegra; Abdelilah Hamdouchi’s detective series, published by Hoopoe.
• You can also listen to Jonathan Guyer’s The Strange Case of the Arabic Whodunnit on BBC4.
• Iraq + 100, ed. Hassan Blasim, is available from Comma Press in the UK and Tor in the US.
• “Saudi discovers science fiction” or “L'Arabie saoudite découvre la science-fiction” appears on Orient XXI.
• See more about Osama Al Muslim’s Basateen Arabistan at GoodReads.
• The novel HWJN, by Yasser Bahjat and Ibrahim Abbas, is available in English and Arabic.
• You can read Maysaa Alamoudi’s Mimosa in Arabic.

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We spend most of this episode talking about two books: the late Arwa Salih’s Stillborn, a memoir of and reckoning with her time as a leftist student militant in Egypt in the 1970s; and Rabai al-Madhoun’s novel Fractured Destinies -- about lives constrained, conflicted and divided in Palestine.

Show notes

• Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn, tr. the brilliant Samah Salim and published by Seagull Books as part of their “Arab List,” curated by Hosam Aboul-ela.
• Rabai al-Madhoun’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning Fractured Destinies (published in Arabic as called Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba), tr. Paul Starkey, and extends the universe of Walid al-Dahman who first appeared in IPAF-shortlisted The Lady from Tel Aviv, tr. Elliott Colla.
• The claustrophobia was reminiscent of Mohammed Sabaaneh’s collection of political cartoons White and Black.
• For books in a constellation around The Stillborn, we mentioned: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile, tr. Frances Liardet, Youssef Rakha’s Crocodiles, tr. Robin Moger, and Mohammed Rabie’s Otared, tr. Moger.

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Show notes

• At the recent Yale symposium on translation, Samah Salim discussed the relationship between translator, text, and paratext in “Paratext and Political Translation,” with a focus on the introduction, footnotes, and glossary of her translation to Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn. Kamran Rastegar talked about “Translational Infidelity: Paul Bowles’ notes on For Bread Alone.”
• If you are near Princeton on April 23 at 4:30, do come hear MLQ speak about “Shifting Local, Regional, and International Pressures on Arabic Literature.”
• The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction will be announced Tuesday, April 24. MLQ’s prediction of Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of K as the winner will almost certainly not come true.
• A Tree Whose Name I Don't Know, by Golan Haji,tr. Haji & Stephen Watts, was a favorite of MLQ’s that did not make the recent Best Translated Book Award poetry longlist. 
• Tales of Yusuf Tadros, by Adel Esmat, tr. Mandy McClure, has just been released in English and MLQ was hoping it will receive some prize attention.
• Leila al-Shami, co-editor of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, is author of “The Anti-Imperialism of Idiots.”
• Randa Jarrar is the author of A Map of Home (2008), Him Me Muhammad Ali (2016) and a handful of tweets about the late Barbara Bush’s legacy that were turned into a major trolling campaign and news story. She teaches at Fresno State, where President Joseph Castro has suggested the university is investigating her tweets, which, he has alleged, “wasn’t just a free speech issue.”  
• In “Can Muslim Feminism Find a Third Way?” Ursula writes about the resignation of Asma Lamrabet, a well-known Moroccan feminist, from her position at the Mohammedan League of Scholars. Lamrabet was also discussed in Episode 2.

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Show notes

• The Center for Translation Studies at The American University in Cairo will be celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2020, and to commemorate nine years of CTS lectures—MLQ gave one in 2013—the head of the center, Dr. Samia Mehrez, is bringing together an anthology of essays. The book will be coming out from AUC Press in English, and an Arabic edition will follow.
• The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction was Palestinian-Jordanian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Dog War II. MLQ had predicted a win for Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of ‘K,’ so her streak of incorrect IPAF predictions is unbroken. You can read excerpts from all six shortlisted books in English translation and an additional one from Dog War II from Wen-chin Ouyang.
• The Naguib Mahfouz Medal-winning Tales of Yusuf Tadros, by Adel Esmat, tr. Mandy McClure, is available from Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an extract of the translation online.
• The Nobel Prize for Literature has been cancelled for 2018. Tim Parks suggests “The Nobel Prize for Literature Is a Scandal All by Itself” and Ron Charles, at the Washington Post, suggests “The Nobel Prize in literature takes a year off. Let's make it two.” Also: “Junot Díaz withdraws from Sydney Writers' festival following sexual harassment allegations.”
• You can find the Kayfa Ta project’s Arabic originals and English translations at kayfa-ta.com. That’s where you can download a PDF of Haytham al-Wardani’s How to Disappear translated by Jennifer Peterson and Robin Moger, or in the Arabic. Iman Mersal’s How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts is also available in Arabic. Robin Moger’s English translation should be forthcoming somewhere this year.

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Show notes

• An overview of the “Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation” series appeared on the website al-Fanar. The whole series – which will consist nineteen interviewsas of May 21 – can be found on ArabLit. The series will go on hiatus over the summer, but will hopefully be spun into a stand-alone resource.
• Rabih Alameddine’s“Comforting Myths: Notes from a Purveyor”and takes us from Superman to Joseph Conrad to “the cute other,” with stops at Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, Hisham Matar’s The Return, and one of Alameddine’s own novels, which a 2008 New York Times reviewcalled “a bridge to the Arab soul.” As Alameddine has said elsewhere: “What the fuck is the Arab soul?”
• Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, co-edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, is forthcoming June 5 from Duke University Press. The selection of texts, many appearing for the first time in English translation, includes “manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, letters, and the guest-book comments[.]” Some can be read online.

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Show notes:

• May Hawas’s essay How Not to Write on Cosmopolitan Alexandria takes as its starting point Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and particularly the first book, Justine.
• The renowned poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy has shaped Alexandria’s literary image and aura. Ibrahim Abdelmeguid is perhaps Egypt’s best-known Alexandria-focused author (read his No One Sleeps in Alexandria, for instance, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab), although Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar may the best-known book set in the city. Other major Alexandrian writers include Alaa Khaled and the late Edwar al-Kharrat. Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s St. Theresa, trans. Chip Rossetti, is, in part, about the 1960s expulsions from Alexandria. MLQ admits to not being a fan of Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel, sorry.
• Marwan Hisham’s memoir-reportage Brothers of the Gun, with art by Molly Crabapple, came out May 15. It details life under the Islamic State in Raqqa and covers, from a quite different point of view, some of the same ground as DunyaMikhail’s The Beekeper, which we discussed in Episode 8. 
• Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Occasional Virgin, trans. Catherine Cobham, comes out June 15.
• Stella Gaitano’s Withered Flowers, trans. Anthony Calderbank, is available in bookshops in Juba, South Sudan. We’ll also see if we can convince them to make it more widely available.

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Show notes:

• Ursula’s “Innocence Abroad” responds primarily to Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. 
• Marrakech Noir, ed. Yassin Adnan,is the third Arab city to join the Akashic Books series, following Beirut Noir and published simultaneously with Baghdad Noir. The Marrakesh collection features stories by lesser-known writers like Hanane Derkaoui, whose “A Way to Mecca” has some particularly fun moments, as well as heavyweights like Mahi Binebine, Mohammed Achaari, and Fouad Laroui—whose short-story collection The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers was translated by Emma Ramadan. Fouad and Emma previously talked with MLQ about the collection and about writing in Moroccan Arabic. 
• Hossam Abouzahr, who runs the excellent “Living Arabic” project, also wrote “Standard Arabic is on the Decline: Here’s What’s Worrying About That.” In part, it responds to Elias Muhanna’s much-discussed New Yorker essay on “Translating ‘Frozen’ into Arabic.”
• Jeremy Harding wrote in the LRB about writing workshops in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine.
• Two fun, free Arabic-learning apps for young childrenare “Antura and the Letters” and “Feed the Monster.” The Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature also recognizes a “digital book app” category each year.
• Mohamed al-Bisatie’s World Cup novel is Drumbeat. James Murua first had the idea of creating a writers’ team for the World Cup, using the hashtag #AfricanWriterWorldCupSquad.

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Show notes

• Karl Sharro spoke about Karl ReMarks’ new book, And then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News’ (and Analysis). The book is forthcoming July 9.
• Boyd Tonkin’s The 100 Best Novels in Translation was released June 21. The two Arabic novels that made the list were Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, and Angele Botros Samaan. The translation was overseen by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, along with Martha Levin, and their notes on the manuscript can be found at the Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.
• You can read the Amazon press release online about how the mega-corporation has (finally) launched some 12,000 Arabic ebooks into the Kindle system. You can find and purchase them on Amazon.com.

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Show notes

• A record-breaking four of the 18 “PEN translates” prizes for 2018 are going to books translated from Arabic. They are: The Book of Cairo, edited by Raph Cormack, with various authors and translators; My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury,translated by Humphrey Davies; Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; and The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, also translated by Jaquette. 
• More about the great Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannouscan be found at the World Theatre Day website.
• A Seismography of Struggle: Towards a Global History of Critical and Cultural Magazines is a project of the French National Institute of Art History; an exhibition and talks were recently hosted by Kulte Gallery in Rabat. 
• The Iraqi comix collectivethat was refused Swiss visasis Mesaha,and you can find more about them on their Facebook page.
• Lamia Ziade’s Ô Nuit Ô Mes Yeux is a stylish, charming illustrated text about the larger-than-life lives of Arab musicians. An excerpt titled “Fairouz in my Grandfather’s Shop,” translated into English by Edward Gauvin, appears in the July 2018 Words Without Borders. Ziade’s Bye Bye Babylon has been translated into English by Olivia Snaije. 
• Another beach read is Radwa Ashour’s The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, translated by Michelle Hartman. Other portraits of the US discussed: Tawfiq al-Hakim in The Revolt of the Young, which has been translated by Mona Radwan; Yusuf Idris’s New York 80; Alaa al-Aswany’s Chicago, which was translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa; Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s Sleeping with Strangers, translated by Chip Rossetti; and Sayyid Qutb.
• And—there is some debate over whether this is a beach read—but  Moroccan author-filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, translated by Lara Vergnaud, and his The Shutters, translated by Emma Ramadan are newly out from New Directions Books, and get a recommendation both from Ursula and from MLQ.

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Show notes

• This was our back to school episode, informed by the scholarship of Erin Twohig and Ursula’s “Hard Lessons: North African Writers on Education” at al-Fanar. We particularly talked about Mohamed Nedali’s Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine, a satiric and scathing account of the life of a schoolteacher in Morocco, and also Radwa Ashour’s writing on education, in her The Journey (translated by Michelle Hartman) and her later Spectres (translated by Barbara Romaine).
• The discussion also veered slightly to the interview and mixtape with Ma3azef magazine co-founder Ma’an Abu Taleb on Bidoun.
• Ursula’s summer reading included Mustafa Khalifa’s devastating novel The Shell, based on his experiences in Syria’s Tadmor prison, in which he reclaims and re-inscribes humanity. It has been translated to English by Paul Starkey.
• The death of V.S. Naipaul led to several interesting conversations about his work and legacy. Here is one, between Nikil Saval and Pankaj Mishra in n+1.
• And here is a piece by Teju Cole from a few years back about meeting the writer.
• Finally, Kuwaiti readers are pushing back against censorship -- you can follow the online part of the campaign at #ممنوع_في_الكويت and #صور_كتاب_ممنوع_في_مكتبتك. MA student Abrar Alshammari is writing up a longer essay on the current situation for Arablit, but for background, 'It's like they were selling heroin to schoolkids': censorship hits booksellers at Kuwait book fair at The Guardian and Leading Kuwaiti Writers Saud Alsanousi and Bothayna al-Essa on Pushing Back Against a Season of Censorship at ArabLit.

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We talk about looking down on dialect; passing literary theft off as “salvation”; the beginning of awards season; a book that is a fragmented portrait of Jerusalem; and our fellow podcasters in the region.

Show notes

• The controversy over the appearance of some darija (Moroccan colloquial) words in a Moroccan school textbook reached the highest levels of government.

• Since we recorded Episode 20, Israel’s Resling Publishing has pulled a short-story collection, Horreya, in which they published women’s short stories translated from Arabic to Hebrew. Resling’s statement says that they are investigating the matter. The cover image, by the Lebanese cartoonist Hasan Bleibel, was also taken without permission, and the artist was not credited for his work. Earlier, Resling’s chief editor, Idan Zivoni, gave a statement that was translated and posted on Hyperallergic.

• The shortlist for the first-ever ArabLit Story Prize was announced September 15; longlists for the major French literary prizes have also appeared. Moroccan author Meryem Alaoui made the Goncourt longlist with her La verite sort de la bouche du cheval, and Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek made the Prix Femina longlist with Khaled Osman's translation of her المشّاءة, translated to La Marcheuse in the French, and working title The Blue Pen in English. 

• The work of postcard-like fragment-stories set in Jerusalem is Mahmoud Shukair’s Jerusalem Stands Alone, which has recently been translated by Nicole Fares for Syracuse University Press.

• We also mention some other great podcast networks in the region: Sowt from Jordan and mstdfr from Saudi Arabia. 

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This week we talk to an old Cairo friend, acclaimed Egyptian artist Ganzeer, about art, propaganda, publishing and how much damn work it is to put out a graphic novel.

Show notes

• The work of artist and writer Ganzeer can be found at ganzeer.com, thesolargrid.net, and timesnewhuman.com. You can sign up for his newsletter at restrictedfrequency.com and follow his YouTube channel, Ganzeer Says. 

• The first four chapters of The Solar Grid are available for download at thesolargrid.net, and his earlier collaboration, The Apartment at Bab El-Louk (written by Donia Maher, co-illustrated by Ahmed Nady, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), is available from Darf Publishers and online.

• The new Epic of Gilgamesh graphic novel was translated by Kent Dixon and illustrated by Kevin Dixon.

• The Rusumat comix platform, featuring works in Arabic and in English, is at rusumat.co.

Buy on thesolargrid.net

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In this episode we talk about recent developments in Cairo, kids’ literature in Arabic, Naguib Mahfouz, and the launch of Marcia’s new project, the literary magazine ArabLit Quarterly.

Show notes 

•  It was at the October 22 outreach symposium in Cairo that MLQ launched “ArabKidLitNow!” – a collective for the promotion of Arabic children’s literature in translation. The website is arabkidlitnow.com.

• We mention the extraordinary work of the Egyptian Mada Masr news site, including this ground-breaking story. 

• At the website, you can learn about the titles that won this year’s Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, the top regional award for Arabic kid lit, including Koozy (about losing your kitty), Think of Others (an illustrated version of Mahmoud Darwish’s famous poem), and Mama, My Classmate, a chapter book about the narrator’s mom coming to learn English with her in class. The YA prize went to Walid Daqqa, a 57-year-old Palestinian writer who’s been behind bars since the age of 25, called The Secret of Oil.

• Ursula’s long-awaited essay “The World of the Alley: Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo,” finally appeared in The Nation. Ursula talked about reading Gamal al-Ghitani’s Meetings with Mahfouz, how al-Ghitani brought her to meet the master, and Mahfouz’s iron habits.

• MLQ talked about the Fall 2018 debut of ArabLit Quarterly, set for a November 15 release. The theme of the first-ever ArabLit-affiliated magazine is “beginnings.” Those who want to be subscribers can do so through Patreon; otherwise, a storefront will be ready on November 15.

• Finally, we circled back to Cairo and the lovely coffee-table book Khatt: Egypt’s Calligraphic Landscape, out in September from Saqi. 

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We overcame communication blocks and interrupting children to speak to the poet Zeina Hashem Beck about how she’s given herself permission to write poems that move between English and Arabic. We also discuss James Montgomery’s heart-breaking essay on grief, memory, trauma and translating a 7th century Arabic poet famous for her elegies.

Show notes:

• Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet who lives in Dubai. She won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts (April 2017) as well as the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize for There Was and How Much There Was, chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, as well as many more prizes you can read about on her website.

• The first of her new “duet poems,” which weave together separate and distinct threads of Arabic and English, appeared in The Lifted Brow, with more forthcoming in The Adroit and Modern Poetry in Translation.

• She read the poem “Blue / أزرق.”

• James Montgomery, author-translator of Loss Sings, is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. This collection of Montgomery’s meditations is twined with translations of seventh-century poet al-Khansa’. It is part of The Cahier Series published by Sylph Editions in collaboration with The American University of Paris.

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This episode is almost entirely dedicated to the work of the Moroccan film-maker, novelist, artist, and poet Ahmed Bouanani – much of which has yet to be released, and much of which was censored or destroyed in his own life.

Show notes

• Bouanani’s cult-classic novel L’hôpital was re-published in 2012 by DK Editions in Morocco and Editions Verdier in France. Muhammad al-Khudairi’s Arabic translation was published in 2016. Two of Bounanai’s books have been released this year in English translation: The Shutters (translated by Emma Ramadan) and The Hospital (translated by Lara Vergnaud), both from New Directions Press.  

• A fragment of Bouanani’s filmwork can be seen online: his film about Casablanca in the 1960s,  “6 et 12”, is on YouTube, as is a section of As-Sarab / Mirage. The film-maker Ali Essafi’s documentary about Bouanani is entitled Crossing the Seventh Gate.

• Touda Bouanani, Ahmed Bouanani’s daughter and a visual artist, has conserved his work and featured it in her own.

• Ursula’s piece on Bouanani in the New York Review of Books is unfortunately pay-walled now.

• Marcia should have a piece about the discovery of Naguib Mahfouz’s “lost” manuscript, set to be published December 11 by Dar al-Saqi in Lebanon, forthcoming soon in LitHub. An extended Q&A with translator Roger Allen, agent Yasmina Jraissati, and manuscript-discoverer Mohamed Shoair will follow on ArabLit. The English translation of what’s being called The Whisper of Stars is forthcoming from Saqi Books in 2019.

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Ursula and MLQ look back at notable books from 2018 and at reads they are looking forward to catching up on over the holiday break. 

Show notes

• ‘Tis the season for “best of” lists. Ursula wrote about Notable Books of 2018 From and About the Arab World in Al-Fanar; a number of them are books we have discussed on the show. One that we haven’t is Casablanca, Nid d’artistes, ed. Leila Slimani and Kenza Sefrioui. 

•  Marcia was still working to compile the “Arab Authors’ Favorites” list that ArabLit runs every year. Early favorites included Mohamed Kheir’s Afalaat al-‘asabie, Muhairi Huwaidi’s Wa Kan al-Bayt Akhi al-Saba’a, and Mohamed Shoair’s Awlad Haretna: Biography of a Forbidden Novel.

•  We talked about Shoair’s Biography of a Forbidden Novel, which focuses on Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of Our Alley, and the intimidation of other public intellectuals, particularly Nasr Abu Zeid and Farag Fouda. Shoair’s book is dedicated to Taha Hussein and Nasr Abu Zeid.

•  Yasmine Rashidi wrote in the New York Times about “How Egypt Crowdsources Censorship.”

•  Nawal Nasrallah was one of the winners of the $2M Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation, based in Qatar, for her translation of the fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table.

•  And, on December 11, Saudi writer Omaima al-Khamis was announced as the winner of this year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, for her historical novel Voyage of the Cranes over the Agate Cities.

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We're back! And ready to talk about two poets who have moved into prose: the Egyptian Iman Mersal and the Palestinian Mazen Maarouf, who have written books that explore the bonds between children and parents, among other things. We also talk about the Cairo book fair's recent make-over, and about the vibrant but struggling cultural scene in Casablanca. 

 Show notes

• Iman Mersal's How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts was translated by Robin Moger and published by the Kayfa Ta initiative. It's available from Neel wa Furat and Jamalon and, we hope, from good bookstores everywhere.

•  Mazen Maarouf's Jokes for the Gunmen, winner of the inaugural Almultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story, was translated by Jonathan Wright and published by Granta. You can read the story “Portion of Jam,” from the collection, on the Granta website.

• The Cairo International Book Fair (@cairobookfair), which has moved from the Nasr City Fairgrounds to the exhibition center in New Cairo, runs through February 5. Ursula has written about previous iterations here and here. 

• Casablanca, nid d'artistes just came out from Malika éditions, ed. Kenza Sefri and Leïla Slimani, featuring profiles and work by 115 artists.

• Here is a link to the discussion that got the Moroccan cultural NGO Racines in legal trouble.

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What should you recommend to someone who is interested in exploring Arabic literature? We tackle this big question this week; we also talk about the authors short-listed on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and about North African literature in English translation.

Show notes:

• There are many opinions on where you should start with Arabic literature. Back in 2010, Ursula’s five-to-read-before-you-die were: Memory for Forgetfulness, Mahmoud Darwish; Season of Migration to the North, Tayyeb Saleh; The Trilogy or Children of the Alley by Naguib Mahfouz; Bleeding of the Stone, Ibrahim al-Koni; Youssef Idris’s stories in Arabic.

• The shortlist for the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, for the first time, features more women writers than men. MLQ was already profiling shortlisted writer Shahla Ujayli: outtakes from the interview are on ArabLit, where you can also read a long Q&A with the translator of Ujayli’s A Sky So Close to Us, Michelle Hartman.

• The long list of 100 Algerian books available in English translation, put together by Nadia Ghanem also comes with a 6-book starter kit from Dr. Ghanem and MLQ. Next up are Moroccan and Tunisian literatures in translation.

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We spend most of this episode discussing the work and life of the Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous, and how strongly it relates to repression, resistance and art in the Arab region today.

SHOW NOTES:

• A new Sa’dallah Wannous reader, Sentence to Hope (ed. and trans. Robert Myers and Nada Saab) brings together four translations of plays as well as essays by and interviews with the great Syrian playwright (1941-1996).

• Read more about reading Wannous in Syria in Matthew McNaught’s  essay “Yarmouk Miniatures” and about Arwa Salih and the Arab left to which he belonged in Ursula’s “Lessons of Defeat: Testimonies of the Arab left.”

• The founder of Egypt’s Dar Tanmia Bookshop and Publishing, Khaled Lutfi, was sentenced to five years in a military trial at the beginning of February. A statement of support for Lutfi has been circulating online, in Arabic and English.

• The Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji currently lives in the US after serving two years in jail on indecency charges.

• The photographer we mention is Mohamed Abu Zeid – Shawkan – who should never have been jailed in the first place and is currently being held unlawfully beyond his release date.

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In this episode we rave about an Omani novel – a multi-generational saga that is “anti-romantic and anti-nationalistic.” We also discuss a dark family road trip through Syria, and works from Lebanon and Morocco. And we delve into the larger question of how much a writer’s identity and experience gives him or her the right, or the ability, to tell certain stories. 

 Show notes:

• The Man Booker International announced their 2019 longlist last Wednesday, and there were two Arabic novels: Jokha al-Harthi’s Celestial Bodies, translated by Marilyn Booth, and Mazen Maarouf’s Jokes for the Gunmen, translated by Jonathan Wright.

• There was also an MBI-longlisted novel set in Morocco that was originally written in Dutch: Tommy Wieringa’s The Death of Murat Idrissi, translated by Sam Garrett. The translation was reviewed in The Guardian.

• Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work, translated by Leri Price, was released in February.

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We talk about the career of the best-selling Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany – who like many other artists is on the outs with the country’s military regime now. Also, about Shakespeare productions and censorship in Gulf countries; and book reviews in the age of online algorithms and the culture of positivity.

Show notes

• At the end of February, Youm7 reported that a lawyer submitted a complaint to the Prosecutor-General (No. 2697 of 2019) against Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany, in which he accused the author of The Yacoubian Building and The So-Called Republic of spreading false news, as well as cynicism and ridicule of the state’s leaders on social media. This story spread and, in mid-March, Mesreyoun reported that a lawyer had filed a complaint with the military prosecutor. It’s still unclear what’s happening; the NGO ANHRI has asked whether political “hesba” lawsuits can now be filed in military courts; there has not yet been an official answer. Thanks to TIMEP for assistance in sorting all this out. (Back in 2013, Al Aswany, like the vast majority of Egyptian artist and intellectuals, justified violence against members of the Muslim Brotherhood and supported their overthrow.)

• The actors Amr Waked and Khaled Abol Naga have been prosecuted and smeared recently for speaking out against Egyptian government repression.

• Ursula’s “heart-breaking” interview with Sonallah Ibrahim was published in Mada Masr in 2013.

• Palgrave Macmillan published Katharine Hennessey’s Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula in 2018.

• And in the last issue Harper’s Christian Lorentzen writes about the art of criticism in the age of algorithms, in “Like This or Die.”

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MLQ is back from Abu Dhabi, and we talk about the recently awarded International Prize for Arabic Fiction — and an unfortunate controversy this year, involving leaks, no-shows, and calls for prosecution — and the book fair. We also share excerpts from the winning book and from several of the short-listed ones.

Show Notes

• The International Prize for Arabic Fiction announced the prize’s 2019 winner, Hoda Barakat’s The Night Post, on April 23. The name of the winner, and a few apparent details about the judging process, was leaked by former IPAF judge Abdo Wazen in Independent Arabia a few hours before the official announcement.

•  The prize’s official statement about the leak can be found on their website. Also notable are Arab Writers Union head Habib al-Sayegh’s comments about the leak, Hoda Barakat’s acceptance speech, and shortlisted writer Kafa Al-Zou’bi’s social-media habits.

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This week we talk about how MLQ’s latest passion project, the Arab Lit Quarterly, and the ups and downs of making a living (sort of) writing about books.

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We spend most of today’s episode talking about a forthcoming collection of essays by female journalists from the region. Guilt, anger, recklessness, determination. There are many different and movingly honest takes on reporting while Arab and female.

SHOW NOTES

• Omani novelist Jokha al-Harthi and translator Marilyn Hacker won the 2019 Man Booker International with Celestial Bodies (Sayyidat al-Qamr). We talked about the book on Episode 29 and MLQ spoke to al-Harthi and Booth the morning after their win, and an edited Q&A was published on Qantara. Also: more on the Omani writers al-Harthi recommends you read.

•  Ursula’s piece about Sa’adallah Wannous, “Coup de Théâtre,” is in the NYRB. The great playwright’s daughter, Dima Wannous, is also an acclaimed novelist and will be appearing at this year’s Shubbak Festival. Her novel The Frightened is expected in 2020 in Elisabeth Jaquette’s English translation.

• Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World, ed. Zahra Hankir, will be published August 6, 2019, when an audiobook version, read by Soneela Nankani, will also be available. Among the many brilliant contributors is Lina Attallah, who both MLQ and Ursula have worked with variously at Al-Masry al-Youm, the Egypt Independent, and her current iconic, fearless, and relentlessly experimental project, Mada Masr.

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We have novelist Ruqaya Izziddien as our guest in this episode, to discuss her debut novel The Watermelon Boys, her blog Muslim Impossible and the need for more narratives in English that accurately represent Arab voices and history. We also talk about George Orwell’s 1939 essay “Marrakech.”

Show Notes

• Our guest this episode was Ruqaya Izzidien, author of The Watermelon Boys, which was shortlisted for this year’s Betty Trask Prize. Ruqaya will also be appearing June 30 at the Shubbak Festival in London, on a panel with Inaam Kachachi and Rabai al-Madhoun, and possibly Hammour Ziada.

• Hanna Diyab is acknowledged -- in Antoine Galland's diary and is Diyab's own writings -- as the author of the "Aladdin" story commonly bundled in with the 1001 Nights. A French translation of Diyab’s travel narrative, D’Alep à Paris: Les pérégrinations d’un jeune syrien au temps de Louis XIV, appeared in 2015, edited and translated by Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, Bernard Heyberger, and Jérôme Lentin. An English translation, by Elias Muhanna and Johannes Stephan, is tentatively scheduled for Fall 2020.

• Dr. Debbie Reese and Dr. Jean Mendoza are the forces behind the invaluable American Indians in Children's Literature.

• You can read a transcript of the film Reel Bad Arabs, based on the classic book by Jack Shaheen.

• The Dzanc Books statement about Hesh Kestin's The Siege of Tel Aviv is available on the publisher's website.

• Izzidien is also the editor behind Muslim Impossible, a new website that “reviews fictional Muslim and Arab characters in film, TV and literature that are unbelievable, poorly-researched or prejudiced.”

• We disagreed about whether George Orwell’s “Marrakech” essay falls in that category. Here is a video and translation of part of the essay into Darija by a Moroccan YouTuber.

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In our last episode before half our team moves and we take a summer break, we discuss a brilliant essay on the downsides of being a professional translator; the Shubbak literary festival; and our plans for the future.

Show Notes

We read from Lina Mounzer’s ”Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage,” which recently appeared on the Paris Review and struck a nerve among translators, editors, and various other word-jobbers. You can also another essay of Mounzer’s on life as a translator: “War in Translation: Giving Voice to the Women of Syria.”

The literary strand of the Shubbak Festival took place at the end of last June in London; there was some discussion online of the first panel on feminism. You can also get panelist and graphic novelist Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik online.

During our summer hiatus, please take share Bulaq with a friend. Also, if you are so inclined, share your feedback with us on our Twitter handle @bulaqbooks: What was your favorite episode? What would you like to hear more of? Are there particular topics, essays, or books that you think would make for an interesting discussion on Bulaq? What else, if anything, would you like to tell us?

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Ursula & MLQ open the new season of BULAQ -- recorded in Amman, under the auspices of the Sowt network -- with a focus on Egypt.

• This episode's reading is from Yasmine Zohdi's translation of Muhammad al-Haj's Sawiris-winning Nobody Mourns the City's Cats, available in the Summer 2019 issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

• Azzurra Meringolo Scarfoglio’s book of interviews with Egyptian exiles is Fuga dall’Egitto (“Escape from Egypt”).

• Ursula reviewed Peter Hessler’s The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, in the New York Review of Books.

• More than 2,000 Egyptians have been detained in a massive sweep of arrests following a new series of protests across the country; among the detainees is Egyptian novelist Muhammad Aladdin, whose charming revolution story, "Season of Migration to Arkadia," is available in Humphrey Davies' translation.

• Marcia guest-edited the last issue of Words Without Border, focused on Arabic humor. 
  
  

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We talk about two festivals (one long-established, one brand new) that celebrate Palestinian literature; an author who was penalized for supporting BDS; and a book that asks the question: What would happen if Palestinians simply disappeared? (And once again we recorded this episode in the studio of the wonderful Sowt platform in Amman).

Show Notes

• Jayne Cortez’s poem “There It Is” was performed by Sapphire at Palfest 2014. 

•  Palfest was re-launched this year with a focus on knowledge production and an emphasis on how Palestine fits within larger struggles against imperialism, racism and economic exploitation. 

•  The first-of-its kind literary festival Palestine Writes will be held in New York in March 2020. 

•  Kamila Shamsie was de-awarded the Nellie Sachs literary prize over her support of the Palestinian BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) movement. Hundreds of writers signed a statement of solidarity with her. 

•  Benjamin Netanyahu promised further annexations in the West Bank during his last electoral campaign. The details of the Trump administration’s “deal of the century” have yet to emerge. 

•  As the New York Times reported recently, Israel bans Arabic-language books from entering the country.

• Ibtisem Azem’s The Book of Disappearance was translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon. 

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We discuss two novels set in Iraq -- one featuring a despondent policeman, and one featuring a determined grandma and her donkey. Also, how John Updike once dismissed the great Saudi writer Abdelrahman Mounif as "insufficiently Westernized" to write a novel.

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In the first half of the episode, we paid tribute to Jordanian poet, activist, novelist, travel writer, and editor Amjad Nasser (1955-2019), who died at the end of October. In the second, we talked about the political space occupied by Moroccan-French writers Tahar Ben Jelloun and Leïla Slimani, particularly in the wake of the trial against—and pardon of—Moroccan journalist Hajar Raissouni over an alleged abortion. What is a writer’s responsibility in a society, or between societies? And what about those of us who talk about, report on, and frame literature? (This episode partly recorded and produced in the offices of the Sowt network). 

SHOW NOTES

• A short English-language tribute to Amjad Nasser on ArabLit, and a longer one in Arabic on 7iber.

• Nassar’s recent poems are available on Facebookbutnot yet in translation.Other poems have been translated by Sinan Antoon and Fady Joudahand by the Poetry Translation Center. 

• The letter in Le Monde, co-composed by Slimani, « Nous, citoyennes et citoyens marocains, déclarons que nous sommes hors la loi,» and also the pieces about Slimani in The New Yorkerand LitHub. Since we aired the episode, another fawning profile of Slimanihas been published in Le Monde.

• Tahar Ben Jelloun, writing in Le Point: “Vous, obscurantistes, êtes en train de prendre le Maroc de la modernité en otage.”

• Also the criticism of both writers by Omar Brousky in Orient XXI.

• Ursula’s editorial in the New York Timesabout the Hajar Raissouni case.

• Ben Jelloun’s On Terrorism: Conversations with My Daughterwill be coming to English in February 2020.

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We talk about a newly released collection of five compelling and highly quotable interviews with the great late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, titled Palestine as Metaphor, translated by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché. We also talk about recent protests in Lebanon and how they are being written about in Lebanese and international media, as well as the frightening day when the independent Egyptian news site Mada Masr’s offices were raided and editors detained. (All of Mada’s staff has now been released). This episode was partly recorded and produced in the offices of the Sowt network.

SHOW NOTES

• The Great Lebanese Ponzi Scheme by Lina Mounzer

• The Lebanese Street Asks: ‘Which Is Stronger, Sect or Hunger?’ by Ursula Lindsey

• On Power, Machines, and Departures: Running Mada Masr in Today’s Egypt by Lina Attalah.

• A few things you might like to know about us, by Lina Attalah

• Palestine as Metaphor by Mahmoud Darwish, tr. Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché

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The adaptation of the Egyptian writer Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's hugely popular horror/fantasy series into the Netflix show Paranormal has excited and in some cases disappointed the writer's avid fan base. 

Show Notes: 

Here is the trailer for Netflix's Paranormal series, and an article about Tawfik, a hugely prolific writer of sci-fi, horror and fantasy stories who passed away in 2018. 

We discuss this review by Ahmed Dia Dardir on the site 7iber and this one by Osama Youssef on MadaMasr. 

We also mention Tawfik's novel Utopia, the only one of his books to have been translated into English so far.

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We take a look at a new book about the architecture of twentieth century Cairo, and discuss the Egyptian capital's past, present and future, and the way writers have shaped our view of it.  

Show Notes:

Mohamed Elshahed's architectural survey Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide is newly released from AUC Press, with a foreward by Mercedes Volait. 

Elshahed's longtime blog, Cairobserver, is a must-read for anyone interested in the built world.

 Another recent book that maps Cairo is Humphrey Davies and Lesley Lababidi's A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo; N.A. Mansour recently wrote about both A Field Guide and Cairo Since 1900 in “Two New Books Preserving Cairo's Urban Landscape.”

 Tawfiq al-Hakim's The Prison of Life: An Autobiographical Essay, in which he describes his father's time as an amateur architect, was translated by Pierre Cachia. Other Egyptian literary works that feature architects include Reem Bassiouney's novel Mortal Designs, translated by Melanie Magidow, and Naguib Mahfouz's play The Legacy. 

Also discussed in this episode are Hamdi Abu Golayyel's novels Thieves in retirement (trans. Marilyn Booth) and A Dog With No Tale (trans. Robin Moger).

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Football and Arabic literature haven't always had an easy relationship. Football has inspired famous authors like Mahmoud Darwish, and anonymous fans who have composed powerful stadium chants. But the sport is sometimes looked down on by writers. We celebrate the sport and its chroniclers, featured in the FOOTBALL-themed fall 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

SHOW NOTES

Today, we talk our way through the Fall 2021 issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which is all about literature and football. We open with a chant from the Casablanca team RAJA, “Fi bladi delmouni,” or “I Was Wronged in My Own Country,” in the original and then translated by Hicham Rafik.

For more background, read Aida Alami's “The Soccer Politics of Morocco,” in The New York Review of Books.

We go out on the Ultras Ahlawy chant “Hekayetna,” or “Our Story,” translated by Mina Ibrahim.

We also talk about Mina Ibrahim's moving essay “Egyptian Football's Missing Archives.”

Mid-way, we read from Syrian author Luqman Derky's “Knocking on Blue Freedom's Door,” translated by Daniel Behar.

You can find the issue at arablit.org/store

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“Writer, criminal, and ex-journalist” Ahmed Naji released two books in 2020: the speculative fiction novel (والنمور لحجرتي) And the Tigers to My Room (2020) and the nonfiction work (حرز مكمكم) Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison (2020).

Show Notes: 

Find more about Ahmed's books, short stories, and essays in Arabic and in English translation at ahmednaji.net/

An excerpt of Rotten Evidence appeared in The Believer in Katharine Halls' excellent translation.

Another excerpt appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review.

He spoke about the book in July 2019 at an event in New York City.

Read a brief history of the court case against Ahmed at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP).

Ahmed's “Re-Writing the Future: The Tanta Museum of White History” appears in Arts of the Working Class. It too was translated by Katharine Halls.

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The Egyptian feminist writer and doctor Nawal El Saadawi always spoke her mind. Her early books were explosive testimonials, based on her medical practice and personal experience, about sexual double standards and the abuses women faced because of them. She went on to write many more books, including novels, plays and several memoirs. Over the course of her life she was jailed, censored, fired, admired, and attacked by Islamists as an unbeliever. She is still one of the best-known and most translated Arab women writers. 

Some of the books discussed in this episode include: The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs from the Women's Prison, Woman at Point Zero, Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire. 

The Radical Books Collective and the Adabiyat Book Club are holding an online master class on El Saadawy's famous novel Woman At Point Zero on November 20, with academic and translator Samah Selim. 

Ursula wrote about El Saadawy recently for The New York Review of Books. 

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Translator Sawad Hussain joins us to talk about the challenges of making a living as a translator, the art of co-translation, her focus on Arabic literature from Africa and the Gulf, and the advice she gives to her translation mentees. We also highlight three of Sawad’s recent and forthcoming translations: Haji Jaber’s Black Foam, Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind, and Stella Gaitano’s Edo’s Souls.

Show Notes:

Haji Jaber’s Black Foam, co-translated by Sawad Hussain and M Lynx Qualey, came out in February from AmazonCrossing. You can read reflections on the novel at Hadara magazine and listen to a sample at Amazon.

Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind was published, in Sawad’s translation, by Fitzcarraldo. As Sawad mentions, there is an audio long read at The Guardian.

Stella Gaitano’s Edo’s Souls is forthcoming from Dedalus Press in August in Sawad’s translation. You can read an excerpt and a review at ArabLit, as well as other work by Gaitano.

You can find our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

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Comics artist Rawand Issa joins us to talk about her book Inside the Giant Fish (trans. Amy Chiniara, Maamoul Press); her path from journalism to graphic art; artist groups and collectives across the region; the “new school of Arab comics,” and the challenges of making a living as a comics artist. We also talk about a few other Lebanese graphic novels, particularly Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, and Lena Merhej’s I Think We’ll Be Calmer in the Next War.

Show Notes:

You can find several of Rawand’s books available from Maamoul Press: http://maamoulpress.com. 

Also read Rawand’s “Being Illegal is Unbearable at The Nib, her  ماذا نفعل في مواجهة استمرار العنف ضد النساء؟ at Jeem and her untitled work in Chime.

And if you missed it, there’s a discussion with Rawand and translator Amy Chiniara about Inside the Giant Fish at ArabLit.

Samandal magazine is on Instagram (@samandalcomics), and you can find them at samandal-comics.org.

You can buy copies of the magazine Corniche at the Sharjah Art Foundation website.

Lab619 (@lab619), Skefkef (@skefkefmag/), and Fanzeen Comics (@fanzeencomics/) are on Instagram, while TokTok has a website, toktokmag.com.

Rawand Issa (@rawand.issa_) and Amy Chiniara (@amychiniara) are both on Instagram, too.

Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, from Pluto Press

Lena Merhej’s We Will Be Calmer in the Next War is available online.

Please support BULAQ! You can donate to our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

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Egyptian novelist Hamdi Abu Golayyel died last month at the age of 56. In this episode, we remember Hamdi and his one-of-a-kind literary career, telling the story of Egypt’s laborers, Bedouin, and migrants. 

Show Notes:

Egyptian Novelist Hamdi Abu Golayyel Dies at 56: ‘There Was No One Like Him’

A Special Section at ArabLit on Abu Golayyel, Bedouin Poetry, and ‘The Men Who Swallowed the Sun’

Mohamed Kheir remembers Hamdy

Books available in translation are: Thieves in Retirement (translated by Marilyn Booth), A Dog with No Tail (translated by Robin Moger), and The Men Who Swallowed the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies.

Please support BULAQ! You can donate to our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

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Said Khatibi’s detective novel نهاية الصحراء (End of the Sahara) is set in a remote desert city in Algeria in the Fall of 1988, when the country’s October Riots are about to break out place. The book is one of the winners of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Khatibi explained how his writing is also a way of exploring larger historical crimes. 

Show Notes:

This episode is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.

Today’s guest, Said Khatibi, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2023 in the category of Young Author, for his novel نهاية الصحراء, or “The End of the Sahara.” Khatibi is a writer and journalist who is based in Ljublana, Slovenia.

Khatibi’s 2018 novel Sarajevo Firewood was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2020, and he won the Katara Prize for his 2016 novel Forty Years Waiting for Isabel. His Sarajevo Firewood was translated by Paul Starkey and is available from Banipal Books. 

Edith Maud Hull's 1919 novel The Sheik was adapted into a 1921 film of the same name starring Rudoph Valentino.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for fiction titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae

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We talk to Robin Moger about how he became a translator from Arabic and about what has changed in recent years in the field of Arabic literature and translation and what has stayed the same. Moger’s first book-length literary translation was Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s 2008 novel الفاعل, which became A Dog with No Tail. His most recent is a translation of Iman Mersal’s في أثر عنايات الزيات, which appears as Traces of Enayat from And Other Stories in the UK (2023) and Transit Books in the US (2024). 

Show Notes:

This episode is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe. For more information about the award visit zayedaward.ae

Moger’s old website, Qisas Ukhra, is still available at qisasukhra.wordpress.com. The poem “The Translator’s Soliloquy,” which was read on this episode, is also there. 

More information about his online and offline translations is available at his website: www.robinmoger.com/translations.

You can read an excerpt of Traces of Enayat at ArabLit.

Don’t miss our previous episode with Iman Mersal, “The Books You Need to Read and Write.”

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This episode features writing from and about Gaza, and explores the imperative to write, between hope and hopelessness, at a time when words both seem to count enormously and to not be enough. 

Show Notes

This episode’s cover art is by Chema Peral @chema_peral

Letter from Gaza by Ghassan Kanafani was written in 1956.

Mahmoud Darwish’s Silence for the Sake of Gaza is part of his 1973 collection Journal of an Ordinary Grief. 

The poet Mosab Abu Toha has written about his arrest and his family’s voyage out of Gaza

Atef Abu Seif’s “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” is forthcoming from Comma Press

Fady Jouda’s poetry collection [...] is forthcoming from Milkweed Press

You can read poetry in translation by Salim al-Naffar and Hiba Abu Nada, both killed under Israeli bombardment, at ArabLit. Other magazines that have been translating and sharing Palestinian poetry include Mizna, Fikra, LitHub, The Baffler, and Protean magazine.

The book that was removed from the curriculum in Newark is the book Sonia Nimr co-wrote with Elizabeth Laird, A Little Piece of Ground. 

Ghassan Hages’ essay “Gaza and the Coming Age of the Warrior” asks: “Is it ethical to write something ‘interesting’ about a massacre as the massacre is unfolding?”

Andrea Long Chu’s essay “The Free Speech Debate is a Trap” calls for “fighting with words.”

At the end of the episode, Basman Eldirawi  reads his poem “Santa” in honor of Refaat Alareer, an educator and poet who was killed on December 7. 

#ReadforRefaat is part of a week of action being called for by the Publishers for Palestine collective.  

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Ghassan Kanafani is best known for his famous novellas, but he was many things besides a talented writer: a prolific journalist, an insightful critic and editor, a heterodox Marxist, a spokesman for the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He wrote and lived like he had no time to waste (which turned out to be true: he was assassinated in an Israeli car bombing at the age of 36). He remains one of the most respected and beloved of Arab icons, but his non-fiction work is less known than it should be. In 1970 he wrote a book of historical analysis: The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine. Its translator, historian Hazem Jumjam, joined us for a conversation about this book on a failed revolution and everything we can still learn from it today.

Hazem Jamjoum’s translation of Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine is available from 1804 Books.

Mahmoud Najib’s translation of Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature is available from Ebb Books.

Kanafani’s complete works in Arabic are available from Rimal Books.

Kanafani’s Men in the Sun was adapted to film as The Dupes (1972).

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Majalla 28 is a literary magazine out of Gaza co-producing an issue with ArabLit. We talk about the work by co-editors Mahmoud al-Shaer and Mohamed al-Zaqzouq and read excerpts from that issue. After that, we talk about a particular kind of Palestinian literature – by writers serving life sentences. 

Find out more about the Gaza issue at arablit.org

More writing by Heba Al-Agha, translated by Julia Choucair Vizoso, is also available at arablit.org

You can read more about the late author Walid Daqqa, who died in an Israeli prison, at Jadaliyya

Palestinian prisoner Nasser Abu Srour’s The Wall, translated by Luke Leafgren, is out now from Other Press

A Mask, the Colour of the Sky, by Palestinian writer Basim Khandaqji, won this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Khandaqji is serving three consecutive life sentences; his novel is forthcoming in English translation from Europa Editions.

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Art critic and journalist Kaelen Wilson-Goldie joins us for a sweeping look at the life, writing, and art of singular Lebanese author-artist Etel Adnan (1925-2021).  

Kaelin Wilson-Goldie’s Etel Adnan is available from Lund Humphries.

Adnan’s Time, translated by Sarah Riggs, is available from Nightboat Books.

The Beauty of Light, a collection of interviews with Laure Adler, is available from Nightboat Books in Ethan Mitchell’s translation. It was initially published in French, as "La beauté de la lumière, entretiens," by Éditions de seuil, in 2022.

An excerpt from Adnan’s “Jebu” is available in the single issue of the magazine Tigris, hosted on ArabLit.

Sitt Marie Rose is available in Georgina Kleege’s English translation from the Post-Apollo Press.

Adnan’s essay “On Small Magazines,” where she writes of meeting Abdellatif Laâbi, is available on Bidoun.

Adnan’s “To Write in a Foreign Language” describes her journey with and through languages.

All the images used in promotion of this episode are courtesy of the Sfeir-Semler Gallery. 

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We recorded this interview with Deen in January 2022, just as her debut urban-fantasy trilogy Shubeik Lubeik (“Your Wish is My Command”) was coming out in English. This original and beautifully illustrated story imagines that wishes of varying quality can be bought and sold in contemporary Cairo, with unpredictable and poignant results. It has been widely celebrated and nominated for a Hugo Award.

While the US edition from Pantheon keeps the title “Shubeik Lubeik,” the UK edition from Granta uses a literal translation: “Your Wish Is My Command.”

Find more of Deena’s work at http://deenadraws.art and on Twitter and Instagram as @itsdeenasaur.

The original Arabic three volumes were published by Dar Mahrousa and are available in the US through Maamoul Press.

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An epic historical novel set in Fatimid Cairo, Reem Bassiouney’s The Halva-Maker trilogy won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award and is forthcoming in English. The book explores the founding of Cairo, by a Shia dynasty and a set of generals and rulers who all hailed from elsewhere. We talked to Bassiouney about balancing research and imagination; shining a light on women in Egyptian medieval history; and the heritage (architectural and culinary) of the past.

This episode of the BULAQ podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for fiction titles that have won or been shortlisted for the award. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply. Find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae

Bassiouney is a professor of socio-linguistics at the American University in Cairo. She has won the State Award for Excellence in Literature for her overall literary works, the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature from the Supreme Council for Culture for her Sons of the People: The Mamluk Trilogy (trans. Roger Allen), the Sawiris Cultural Award for her novel Professor Hanaa (trans. Laila Helmy), and a Best Translated Book Award for The Pistachio Seller (trans. Osman Nusairi).

Dar Arab will publish Bassiouney’s The Halva-Maker trilogy and her novel Mario and Abu l-Abbas. Both have been translated by Roger Allen.

Bassiouney’s Ibn Tulun Trilogy, also translated by Roger, was published by Georgetown University Press.

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Moroccan author Karima Ahdad was the winner of this year’s Arabic Flash Fiction contest run by ArabLit and Komet Kashakeel, which saw more than 900 entries from around the world. We read her award-winning story in Katherine Van de Vate’s discussion and discuss patriarchy, story creation, and what it means to write “feminist” work.

Show Notes:

Karima was also shortlisted for an earlier edition of the ArabLit Story Prize. You can read her shortlisted story, “The Baffling Case of the Man Called Ahmet Yilmaz,” in Katherine Van de Vate’s translation.

Katherine also translated an excerpt of Karima’s The Cactus Girls for The Markaz Review.

You can read a conversation between Karima and Katherine about Cactus Girls on arablit.

You can find more about all Karima’s books at her website, karimaahdad.com.

On the topic of the “political” novel, we mentioned Rabih Alameddine’s new book, Comforting Myths.

The Arabic Flash Fiction prize is funded by the British Council’s Beyond Literature Borders programme corun by Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions. Find all the finalists at ArabLit.

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Today’s guest, Irene Lozano, is the director of a Spanish cultural institution, Casa Arabe. It received the 2024 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Cultural Personality of the Year. As we’ll discuss, Casa Arabe is a center of learning, discussion and exchange between Spain and Arab countries. It offers Arabic language classes and a myriad of cultural initiatives and programs, including hosting talks by many prominent Arab writers. In this episode, we discuss the connection between Arabic and Spanish culture, representations of the Arab world in Spain and much more. 

This episode of the BULAQ podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for fiction titles that have won or been shortlisted for the award. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply. Find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae

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In this episode, we talk through some literary news from Algeria and France, discuss two big translations out this fall from towering authors, as well as a new favorite by Maya Abu al-Hayyat. Then we turn to Read Palestine Week and the new collection focused on writers in Gaza, And Still We Write, before a discussion on refusing to work with Israeli publishers that are complicit in the violence against Palestinians. 

Show notes:

Author Kamel Daoud sued over claim he used life of wife’s patient in novel (The Guardian)

An excerpt from Aziz Binebine’s own account of Tazmamart, translated by Lulu Norman (WWB). Binebine’s story was the basis for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light.

Radwa Ashour’s classic Granada Trilogy is finally out in its complete form, in Kay Heikkenen’s translation. You can find the launch discussion at the AUC Press YouTube.

The late Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, translated by the late Humphrey Davies, was published in November by Archipelago Books.

Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s soon-to-be-classic No One Knows Their Blood Type is out in Hazem Jamjoum’s vibrant translation this fall, from Ohio State University Press

You can get a free digital copy of And Still We Write from the ArabLit storefront, https://arablit.gumroad.com/ Those who want a print copy can get one through Mixam.

The letter on refusing to work with Israeli publishers complicit in violence against Palestinians is on the PalFest website.

Ahdaf Soueif responds to some criticism of the letter in the London Review of Books. 

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Comics artist Rawand Issa joins us to talk about her book Inside the Giant Fish (trans. Amy Chiniara, Maamoul Press); her path from journalism to graphic art; artist groups and collectives across the region; the “new school of Arab comics,” and the challenges of making a living as a comics artist. We also talk about a few other Lebanese graphic novels, particularly Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, and Lena Merhej’s I Think We’ll Be Calmer in the Next War.

Show Notes:

You can find several of Rawand’s books available from Maamoul Press: http://maamoulpress.com. 

Also read Rawand’s “Being Illegal is Unbearable at The Nib, her  ماذا نفعل في مواجهة استمرار العنف ضد النساء؟ at Jeem and her untitled work in Chime.

And if you missed it, there’s a discussion with Rawand and translator Amy Chiniara about Inside the Giant Fish at ArabLit.

Samandal magazine is on Instagram (@samandalcomics), and you can find them at samandal-comics.org.

You can buy copies of the magazine Corniche at the Sharjah Art Foundation website.

Lab619 (@lab619), Skefkef (@skefkefmag/), and Fanzeen Comics (@fanzeencomics/) are on Instagram, while TokTok has a website, toktokmag.com.

Rawand Issa (@rawand.issa_) and Amy Chiniara (@amychiniara) are both on Instagram, too.

Lamia Ziadé’s My Port of Beirut, translated to English by Emma Ramadan, from Pluto Press

Lena Merhej’s We Will Be Calmer in the Next War is available online.

Please support BULAQ! You can donate to our fundraiser for the 2023 season at donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

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Journalist, author and editor Alia Malek tells us about her recent visit to Damascus and about the anthology of Syrian writing she edited for McSweeneys. Aftershocks was released in December 2024, just days after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria and the country's political prisons began to crack open. The collection brings together work by sixteen Syrian authors who write from diasporic and refugee experience, as well as from inside Syria. We discuss these key Syrian literary voices and how they and others are meeting this moment.

Show notes:

Get the Aftershocks anthology from McSweeney’s at store.mcsweeneys.net.

Malek’s 2017 book, The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria, is available from Bold Type Books.

Read Malek’s reflections on the death of her father, “‘He Didn’t Want to Lie in a Grave That Couldn’t Be Visited” and her recent “What Did the World Learn From Syria?” in the New York Times.

Read a short conversation with Aftershocks contributor Rawaa Sonbol, “On Being a Writer in Syria Today” and her short story “The Noose Boy,” both at ArabLit.

We mention the late Syrian writers Khaled Khalifa and Saadallah Wannous. 

The photo of Alia Malek in Damascus in January 2025 is by Sabir Hasko. 

You can subscribe to BULAQ on all your favorite podcast networks. You can also follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books, where we post about upcoming episodes and literary events.

Please don’t forget to rate and recommend BULAQ.

We are a non-profit, listener-supported program. If you’d like to make a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

BULAQ is a co-production with the podcast platform Sowt.

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Journalist, novelist, and memoirist Omar El Akkad talks about his latest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – a blend of memoir, social criticism, and moral philosophy. The book creates and shares space for everyone who is full of grief and rage, who cannot be at home in institutions that support or ignore genocide. We discuss the linguistic obfuscations around Gaza, El Akkad’s critique of Western liberalism, and the possibilities for a different future.

Show notes:

You can get One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This from Penguin Random House, where a sample of the audiobook is available, read by Omar El Akkad.

Omar’s first novel, American War, is also available from Penguin Random.

You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. 

BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. 

For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com.

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In Aziz Muhammad’s The Critical Case of a Man Named K, an unnamed narrator is diagnosed with leukemia. His 40-week journal, shaped by his readings of Kafka, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, sarcastically and movingly documents his alienation from his body, his surroundings and even, eventually, from books.

Show Notes: 

An interview with translator Humphrey Davies.

We also talked about a few other works where protagonists are diagnosed with cancer:Shahla Ujayli’s A Sky So Close to Us, translated by Michelle Hartman (Interlink Books); Radwa Ashour’s Heavier than Radwa (Dar Al Shorouk), although this is a memoir; Haifa al-Bitar’s A Woman of This Modern Age (Dar Saqi); Hassan Daoud’s No Road to Paradise, translated by Marilyn Booth (Hoopoe Fiction).

We also mention some Saudi books that have won awards or attracted international attention, such as Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea and The Dove’s Necklace by Raja Alem.

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Author, commentator and human rights advocate Khaled Mansour joins us to talk about how reading Arab women’s memoirs can help one gain a new understanding of the region’s collective history. After he worked with Egyptian psychoanalyst and feminist Afaf Mahfouz to write her autobiography, Mansour began a journey through Arab women’s memoirs set to culminate in his forthcoming podcast, المرآة (The Mirror). One of the many books he discusses with us is Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled’s account of her life and militancy, published in 1973, My People Shall Live.

Show notes:

You can find Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live available free through the Internet Archive.

Afaf Mahfouz’s من الخوف إلى الحرية is available from Kotob Khan.

Links to Khaled Mansour’s work can be found on his website. 

Memoirs by Nawal El Saadawi, Arwa Saleh, Huda Shaarawi, Latifa al-Zayyat, Radwa Ashour are available in English translation. A list of these and more is available at arablit.org. 

You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq. 

BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more. 

For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com.

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An Interview with Maria Dadouch, who won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Children’s Literature this year. Dadouch’s book The Mystery of the Glass ball features two children becoming friends, fighting villains and protecting nature on a train ride in the near future. We talked about the need for more Arabic YA books; contemporary sci-fi; literary prizes; digital publishing and why writing for teenagers is the hardest thing to do.  

This episode is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.

Today’s guest, Maria Dadouch, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2022 in the category of Children’s Literature, for her novel لغز الكورة الزجاجية or "The Mystery of the Glass Ball." Dadouche is a screenwriter and children’s author from Syria who has published over 50 books. 

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children’s Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae

You can find some of Dadouch’s many childrens’ books in Arabic here.  

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The Book of Ramallah collects stories set in and around Palestine's administrative capital, which, Maya Abu Al-Hayat writes in her introduction, “represents this mirage, this glimmer of hope that isn't real, to many writers.”

Show Notes: 

Book of Ramallah, edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat, is available from Comma Press. You can read “Love in Ramallah” by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Mohammed Ghalaieny, at Bookanista. An excerpt from the introduction is available at The Irish Times.

An excerpt of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah, in Ahdaf Soueif's translation, is available at Penguin Random.

An except of Raja Shehaheh's Palestinian Walks is available through PBS.

“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” by Nathan Thrall, is at the New York Review.

The Present, directed by Farah Nabulsi and co-written by Nabulsi and Hind Shoufani, is streaming on Netflix.

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Paradise, by 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, is the coming-of-age story of Yusuf, a Tanzanian boy sent into debt servitude when his father can't pay back an Arab merchant. Yusuf travels into the interior with “Uncle Aziz” and other vivid characters, to trade with the “savages” there. The story takes place on the cusp of World War I, set in the wake of mass enslavement and the advent of European colonialism and interwoven with Yusuf's story from the Quran. Gurnah himself belonged to the Arab elite of Zanzibar, and fled to the UK after a revolution there in the 1960s.

Show Notes

In Episode 84, we discussed the colonial relationship between Oman and East Africa in Jokha Alharthi's The Bitter Orange Tree. 

Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel lecture

Excerpt on Kilwa from Ibn Battuta's RihlatTanzania-Oman Historic Ties: The Past and Present, by Oswald Masebo

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