R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
Publishers weekly, August 2018
“Aspiring author Farid Abu Shaar, the hero of this entertainingly jaundiced look at Beirut’s publishing and printing industry from Lebanese novelist Douaihy (Chased Away), undergoes a series of swift, comical, and brutal face-to-face rejections of his handwritten manuscript, The Book to Come, which is contained in a red notebook and about whose contents the reader learns nothing.
An illegal emigrant writes a letter to his lover; a torturer on the run writes his mother… 5 letters accidentally linked to each other.
It is a fresh, funny and immensely clever take on what life is like for your average millennial in an unstable corrupt country – where anything is possible, and nothing can be relied upon.
The women of Syria have to fight not only the Regime, or the Islamist rebels; they have to fight the whole of a patriarchal society, including male revolutionaries. Yazbek collects their stories.
Published by Livres Hebdo, June 30, 2018
“Syrian writer Samar Yazbek imagines a very metaphorical female protagonist who discovers war and the virtues of literature.”
The Blue Pen, in French “La marcheuse”, will be published end of August 2019.
Novel excerpt published by Word Without Borders, special issue on Lebanon, July 2018
Translated by Robin Moger.
Translator’s Note: Hoda Barakat’s slim novel The Night Post is composed of the texts of six letters interrupted midway through by short, fragmentary pieces of narrative prose. The following excerpt is taken from the beginning of the third letter. A young man, apparently pursued by the authorities, is at the airport when he sees a woman rip up and throw away a sheaf of papers (the novel’s second letter). He reassembles the torn pages and, prompted by their content, …
Novel excerpt published by Word Without Borders, special issue on Lebanon, July 2018
Translated by Paula Haidar.
At an armed checkpoint, sectarian tensions come to bear on one man’s suspect identity in this excerpt from Jabbour Douaihy’s novel Chased Away.
Published by Philip Jenkins for The Christian Century, June 29, 2018
Sinan Antoon is a star of modern Arab fiction, a multiply honored novelist whose books address critical questions of identity, memory, and history. He has an Iraqi Christian background but teaches at New York University—a dislocation that resembles that of so many Middle Eastern Christians in recent years. Antoon’s most recently translated novel, The Baghdad Eucharist, offers Westerners an unparalleled opportunity to understand these events. The book traces the historic catastrophe that has overcome—and is now uprooting—one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
