The Latest

On Mondays this winter, we are publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.

In this classic short story, a woman tries to find a love of equals in early twentieth century Cairo.

“In the beginning, we considered his visit nothing more than an illusion or a daydream, until one evening the village dogs suddenly hushed and stared, bewildered, into the darkness.”

“No electricity tonight. / Boredom is about to kill me.”

Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”

The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.

In this conversation with ArabLit’s Tugrul Mende, translator Alex Elinson talks about how literary prizes affect the translation landscape, the draw of detective novels, and how he hones voice in a novel with many starring characters.

Algerian novelist Said Khatibi talks with us about his latest novel, and the conversation turns to organ theft, the global shifts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and what he hopes to illuminate with crime novels: not the whodunit, but the why.

Will Tamplin has devoted much of his work in translation to sharing the literary world of the exceptionally complex Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. In this interview, Tamplin explores his motivation behind this continuous dedication to Jabra’s work, as he dives into his experience translating The Other Rooms.

“The divide among poets has added a diaspora to the spatial diaspora, which scattered Syrians around the world.”

“In Ways of the Lord, Christians are mistaken for being Jews and are accused of spying for Israel, which demonstrates the lack of recognition of Copts and their conflation with other minorities.”