The Latest

At this point in ‘The Country Doctor’s Tale,’ the titular country doctor is returning from a house call when he suddenly discovers political posters everywhere, even on the walls of the clinic.

“So you are still determined to sell the three mules?”

“The Wall,” by the massively popular Ahmed Khaled Tawfik (1962-2008) is from his collection “Now I Understand.”

“The city wakes up in obituaries.”

“I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.”

“Who am I? / I am not myself.”

In this conversation with Neil Hewison, we discuss what brought him to Mohamed Mansi Qandil’s The Country Doctor’s Tale, the pleasures of the Egyptian village novel, Mansi Qandil’s attention to women’s pain, and what makes a “modern classic.”

In the latest episode of the BULAQ podcast, co-hosts M Lynx Qualey and Ursula Lindsey talk with editor-writer Sara Yasin about the new publication The Key.

Addie Leak talks with Tugrul Mende about the translation process, literary awards, and two very different translations processes: translating one book through a riot of multilingual voicenotes and another by an author who was inaccessible, in an Israeli prison.

“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”