Give and Take

BULAQ | بولاق

In this episode, we talk through some literary news from Algeria and France, discuss two big translations out this fall from towering authors, as well as a new favorite by Maya Abu al-Hayyat. Then we turn to Read Palestine Week and the new collection focused on writers in Gaza, And Still We Write, before a discussion on refusing to work with Israeli publishers that are complicit in the violence against Palestinians.

Show notes:

Author Kamel Daoud sued over claim he used life of wife’s patient in novel (The Guardian)

An excerpt from Aziz Binebine’s own account of Tazmamart, translated by Lulu Norman (WWB). Binebine’s story was the basis for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light.

Radwa Ashour’s classic Granada Trilogy is finally out in its complete form, in Kay Heikkenen’s translation. You can find the launch discussion at the AUC Press YouTube.

The late Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, translated by the late Humphrey Davies, was published in November by Archipelago Books.

Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s soon-to-be-classic No One Knows Their Blood Type is out in Hazem Jamjoum’s vibrant translation this fall, from Ohio State University Press

You can get a free digital copy of And Still We Write from the ArabLit storefront, https://arablit.gumroad.com/ Those who want a print copy can get one through Mixam.

The letter on refusing to work with Israeli publishers complicit in violence against Palestinians is on the PalFest website.

Ahdaf Soueif responds to some criticism of the letter in the London Review of Books.

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