The Latest

Short fiction by Mohammed Hussein Heikal (1888 – 1956) about marriage and money in early twentieth century Egypt.

What happens on New Year’s Eve when a conservative (and naive) father comes to his son’s front door, in Cairo, and hears something he never expected? A holiday classic from Egyptian writer Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni (1889–1949).

New short fiction by the relentlessly creative Palestinian writer Nasser Rabah.

“I’ve said it before, and I say it now on this London evening / before it’s too late: / I am the last communist!”

For Sudanese readers living through the current crisis, the following lines by the late Mohammed el-Makkī Ibrahim resonate with striking immediacy, even though they were written in the 1980s. Beneath the layers of grief, a restrained optimism continues to breathe through its lines.

“Marriage is the afterlife / for which we have to cross this life, / leaving behind our homes and pasts, / waiting for justice with a light heart, / where our homes become our graves.”

In this conversation over e-mail, Sinan Antoon talks about the novel, the fraught nature of collective memory, the process of self-translation, and the sort of “security checkpoints” a book must pass through in the process of translation.

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Jonathan Wright discuss Wright’s start in literary translation, its divergence from the sort of translation he practiced as a journalist, and his ideas about what he calls Arabic polyglossia.

Several authors who contributed short stories to the collection spoke about their thoughts on the collapse of time, historical continuities and the notion of fighting ideological fantasy with fiction.

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.
And I have needed, for ages
A woman to make me sad
A woman in whose arms I could weep
Like a sparrow,