First, it was Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Obie-winning play, “Invasion!”, in NYC; then it was the Tunisian-Swedish author’s fun, fast-paced novel Montecore, which was longlisted for the 2012 “Best Translated Book Award.” Early in 2013, he was in McSweeney’s 42, the translation issue; now it’s Asymptote, and later this month his play “I Call My Brothers” will be in London.
Poet-translators Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour have recently assembled a new anthology: Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013).* We exchanged emails with Pierre Joris about how it came together: ArabLit: Although the title is “poems,” you include… Read More ›
International Prize for Arabic Fiction-shortlisted novelist Hussein El Wad has not yet responded to ArabLit’s request for an interview. However, Tunisian novelist Kamel Riahi conducted one with the charmingly modest El Wad (here), and it is translated to English by Tunisian Literature… Read More ›
Hussein al-Wad (Houcine El Oued) is the only Tunisian novelist on this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction longlist. Al-Wad has long been a man of letters, but is a relative newcomer to novel-writing. Al-Wad has been primarily known as… Read More ›
In mid-January 2011, “If, One Day, A People Desires…” was my poem of poems. At the moment, Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi’s anthem seemed to encompass all hopes, all movement up and away. It pointed toward a life without chains and a… Read More ›
Poet Inas Abassi was at this year’s Tunis International Book Fair, which suffered from an overlap with the powerful Sharjah International Book Fair (Nov. 7-17) and from ongoing political and economic struggles. Nonetheless:
International publishers are meeting in Sharjah again this year, the thirty-first year of its international book fair, although only the fourth in its new guise as one of the world’s important trade fairs. The Sharjah fair — in some ways… Read More ›
If you’re in the SoCal area on Thursday, Oct. 11 and not teaching/working/studying in the early afternoon, that is. Still trying to determine if they’ll be recording. I’ll add that this is a very enjoyable book in excellent translation…. Read More ›
I got a chill, yesterday, re-reading Mohamed Saghir al-Awlad’s “The Will”:
Why no Messadi in English?
Eleuch’s texts make their reader gasp, running after the fleeting tales in a nimble way that is similar to the nimbleness of “Attouga” , the most famous goalkeeper ever of the Tunisian team…
What’s so special about el-Charni’s stories? She has a particularly sensitive management of groups of people, managing deftly to put great variety and power in them, and also to show how they can act together, as a sort of single character, as she did for instance in the story “The Way to Poppy Street,” from her 2002 collection.
