Inspired by timeless poems from around the world, Hassan Massoudy’s calligraphy takes us on a visual journey through love in its many forms. Through his signature broad strokes and vibrant colours, this master calligrapher brings to life the words and wisdom of some of our greatest poets, from Ibn Zaydoun and Rumi to Kahlil Gibran, […]
“The translation is magnificent, and the author is a revelation. Majnun Layla is a complex and layered lyrical story of love. Almost all the sensual and intellectual levels of this story end up in creating a cultural mosaic that is elegiac, supple, graceful, and profound”—Andrei Codrescu, author of Whatever Gets You through the Night: A […]
This collection of short stories, poems, and vignettes offers a window on contemporary literary experimentation in Arabic, as well as attitudes on everyday life and social relations in urban Egypt. Ibtihal Salem deals lyrically with contemporary Egyptian problems from class, gender, and political perspectives.
Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan just before her family fled to Iran. She returned home at the age of give, but when she was 14 the Kurds were attacked with chemical weapons, and her family were forced back into exile. Her poems chart lives of displacement and terror, repression and the subjugation of […]
Nothing More to Lose is the first collection of poems by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish to appear in English. Hailed across the Arab world and beyond, Darwish’s poetry walks the razor’s edge between despair and resistance, between dark humor and harsh political realities. With incisive imagery and passionate lyricism, Darwish confronts themes of equality and […]
A powerful exploratory poem-sequence from a Palestinian poet living in Glasgow and an established Scottish poet which creates a vivid tapestry. It explores their different responses to the Five Pillars of Islam and reflects their cultural backgrounds and views. We find, for instance, Hajj and Pilgrimage combine to form shared experience, and Chaucer is in […]
A prominent practitioner of the Arabic “very short story” (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), Osama Alomar’s poetic fictions embody the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad’s police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first publication of Alomar’s strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion […]
In The Iraqi Nights, the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights, who saves herself through the telling of tales. Unlike Scheherazade, Mikhail isn’t writing to escape death but to confront it through grief and love while summoning the strength to endure. Though the nights are […]
This is an anthology of 19th century Orientalist translations of Arabian poetry, many of which are very rare, as is this particular book. Most of the included works either predated Muhammed or were contemporary, so there are many fascinating bits of pre-Islamic lore. Included is the Moallakat, or the ‘Hanged’ Poems, a collection of seven […]
In 2009, prompted by the Israeli siege of Gaza, Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi and Jewish-American poet Marilyn Hacker started a correspondence. This conversation by Californian based Deema and predominantly Paris based Marilyn was, not surprisingly, conducted thanks to electronic communication. Much more special was the fact that it took the form of responding, directly or […]