My stories flew off like butterflies that have been imprisoned in a locked room.
Maysoon Melek
This epigraph sums up not only the state of the first-person narrator as she wakes up from an anaesthetic in the hospital and starts making up fantastic (...)
I sing, in a tongue not my own.
Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah, an uprooted Palestinian, turned his diasporic identity into world citizenship, and found redemption in universalizing suffering. A medical doctor who traveled to Africa to provide medical (...)
In this slim, handsomely produced volume of poetry by William Melaney — professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo — we encounter world culture in a poetic mode. The cover of the divan by the poet author (...)
The revolutionary moment is a fleeting one — a magic realist moment par excellence. It is magical as it turns ordinary people into heroes, into supermen and superwomen, where hopes are unleashed and the dream seems about to materialise. Whether it (...)
Sharif S. Elmusa, Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987-2008, Northhampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2008. pp71
Gaza is a cage,
barb-wired on the inland sides;
the sea mostly off limits.
-- Sharif Elmusa
In this slim and elegant poetry book, we (...)
Ferial J Ghazoul applauds the authors of a book on the Iraq war who dare say the emperor has no clothes
Brian Eno, Harold Pinter, John le Carré, Richard Dawkins, Michel Faber, Haifa Zangana. Not One More Death. London: Verso, 2006
This little book (...)
On the occasion of the third anniversary of the death of , Ferial J Ghazoul* reviews the posthumous publication of a collection of articles, lectures and class notes
When passed away three years ago, on 25 September, 2003, one of his close friends (...)
Ferial J Ghazoul on a Paris conference that focused on the ability of the Arabic novel to resist hegemonic discourse
Hosted by INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) and UNESCO, a conference on the power of the imaginary (...)
Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. pp1080
Professor Jayyusi -- poet, critic, translator, and editor -- has done it again: another anthology of Arabic literature that puts modern (...)
Ferial J Ghazoul journeys in the Tuareg world of novelist Ibrahim al-Koni
In one of the most innovative international conferences the renowned Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni was both discussed and celebrated in the area where he grew up and where (...)
The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, awarded annually by the American University in Cairo Press for the best recent novel in Arabic went in 1998 to the Algerian writer Ahlam Mosteghanemi for her novel Dhakirat Al-Jasad (Memory in the Flesh). (...)