This article was commissioned to the author by Handelsblatt, September 25, 2015
Things must seem a little familiar for the Europeans, at least for the older generations. The images are the same, even if this time they are in color and are shown in their living rooms, instead of being black-and-white pictures viewed at the local movie theater. They are the images from the years after both World Wars, images of flight and displacement. Horrible images.

This collection of texts was commissioned and published by The Guardian, on September 12th 2015. Photo credit: Ed Alcock, MYOP Diffusion, The Guardian,
The refugee crisis, though long in the news, has suddenly captured the world’s attention. But what are the underlying causes, and what should individuals and governments do to help? Samar Yazbek responded (below) – along with Orhan Pamuk, Arundhati Roy, Elif Shafak, Ahdaf Soueif, Pankaj Mishra,

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Yazbek: “Isis kills 10 people, and the world is outraged. Asad kills thousands, and the world watches in silence”.

Below is an excerpt, read the whole interview here.
(…)
Youssefl Rakha: I go on about this so as to put you in the picture: the nineties, when I started showing my writing to people—that’s when the clash between younger prose poets and older guardians of the poetic ancien régime took place. This is partly of course what The Crocodiles is about. So, when I started writing, I found myself writing prose poems though I thought I wanted to write short stories.

Publishers Weekly, November 28th, 2014
Ever since I started Interlink Publishing 30 years ago, I’ve been a passionate advocate of literature in translation. Literature is universal, and great literature travels well. It can thrive at home, in exile, and, yes, in translation. So why do translated titles make up less than 3% of books published annually in the U.S.? I asked this question when I participated in a panel discussion at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.
But when I was invited to speak at the 2014 Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) …

In the spring of 2014, Ahmad Saadawi’s book Frankenstein in Baghdad was awarded the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the Arab Booker. It is a novel of a kind quite different from the ones generally acclaimed by the public or by critics, and from those that have come to me for consideration in the past few years. Whatever its originality or flaws, its being awarded the IPAF could be the sign of an interesting change to come.
 
As I celebrate this fall my tenth year as a literary …