R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
By Gerald Papy, for Le Vif, Belgium, July 2019
In an isolated village, an evil rumor regarding the wedding night, years before, of Si Bechir, a successful sheep merchant, shakes the lives of three families, while the jolts of the revolution that troubles urban Tunisia barely reaches them. Isn’t it though, the new wind of democracy that blows on this traditional society?
In Stella Maris, Adam has decided to write his story, that of the “New Adam”, which, he would like to believe, starts when he runs away from home at 15, to go as far as possible from his childhood in the ghetto of Lydda (My name is Adam, Children of the ghetto 1), and from his mother Manal. The New Adam is in a painful quest of a restful identity: “I want to become a Jew”, he says. “This is impossible” he is told.
Following the life story of two inseparable friends, Hannah and Zakaria, from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century in Aleppo, No one prayed over their graves, reveals a buzzing, multiconfessional, libertine, tolerant society, coming to grips with the various forms of death.
A detective story set on the background of family and sectarian feuds, The king of India, explores with the right dose of irony, the meaning of attachment to the land.
Insightful and sarcastic, this is the powerful story of a young man diagnosed with leukemia. This debut novel by young Saudi writer Aziz Mohammed tackles modern Arab life.
A review by Christine Zimmer, for DNA, France, 2019
How is a rumor born, what feeds it? Why? To what end? What becomes of the rumor’s victims? Can we find the source of a rumor? How to react when the rumor strikes you fully and hits you in the most intimate parts of your life? Habib Selmi tackles these questions
with great simplicity and a subtle dose of humor that he slips into seemingly innocuous words. His starting point is an ordinary life without frills, in a remote countryside, where people live near each other, and where …
Interview By Christophe Ayad, for Le Monde, July 25th, 2019
Some extracts translated into English published below.
Hoda Barakat is a rare kind of writer. Born in Lebanon in 1952, she published her first novel relatively late, in 1990, shortly after leaving her country because of the civil war.In six novels, she has won almost all of the most prestigious awards in Arabic literature:
Bo Hamby and Simone Popperl produced and edited this interview for broadcast at NPR. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.
The novelist and poet Sinan Antoon grew up in Baghdad, Iraq — a city that’s known many years of sorrow.
He was born to an Iraqi father and an American mother, and lived there until 1991. That was the year of the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, when he hid in the basement of a restaurant as U.S. bombs fell.
Antoon later moved to New York. But after the United States bombed …
“Coup de Théatre”, by Ursula Lindsey, for The New York Review of Books, June 26, 2019
In the spring of 1967, Sa’dallah Wannous, a young Syrian journalist and playwright, was studying theater at the Sorbonne in Paris. That June, after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, it gained control of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Sinai; about 100,000 Syrians were driven from the Golan Heights, which Israel still holds today. It is hard to overstate the psychic and political shock of this turn of events in …
