When this autobiographical work opens, the 20-year-old narrator is desperate to leave his knockabout life in Tangier and attend school. Although the thread of his search for an education runs throughout the book, that subject is overshadowed by tales of getting drunk, sex with prostitutes–a grim recounting that is saved from tawdriness by the narrator’s […]
Fatna El Bouih was first arrested in Casablanca as an 18-year-old student leader with connections to the Marxist movement. Over the next decade she was rearrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured, and transferred between multiple prisons. While imprisoned, she helped organize a hunger strike, completed her undergraduate degree in sociology, and began work on a Master’s degree. […]
Part anthology and part travelogue, “Translating Libya” presents the country through the eyes of sixteen Libyan short story writers and one American diplomat. Intrigued by the apparent absence of ‘place’ in modern Libyan short fiction, Ethan Chorin resolved to track down and translate stories that specifically mention cities and landmarks in Libya. The stories trace […]
In 1966, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, then 22, left his country to return to university in Cairo. A year later came the Six Day War and Barghouti, like many Palestinians living abroad, was denied entry into his homeland. 30 years later, he was finally allowed to visit Ramallah, the city he had grown up […]
In a historical moment when the Western world’s antennae are zeroed in on all things Middle Eastern, books about that part of the world, such as Scott C. Davis’s The Road from Damascus: A Journey through Syria, take on heightened significance. In 1987, five years after the Hama massacre, and with Syria seemingly on the […]
With a writing career spanning some seventy years, Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most recognized writers in the world with. Life’s Wisdom is a unique collection of quotations selected from the great author’s works, offering philosophical insights on themes such as childhood, youth, love, marriage, war, freedom, death, the supernatural, the afterlife, the soul, […]
Diana Abu-Jaber?s vibrant, humorous memoir weaves together stories of being raised by a food-obsessed Jordanian father with tales of Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts and goat stew feasts under Bedouin tents in the desert. These sensuously evoked repasts, complete with recipes, in turn illuminate the two cultures of Diana’s childhood?American and Jordanian?while helping to paint […]