This article was written by Heba Saleh for the Financial Times. Only a few excerpts are featured below. For the full article, please refer to the Financial Times‘ website. Published on October 6th 2015.
Photo credit: The Guardian, Sedat Suna
As the Arab world grapples with unrest across many of its countries, the Arab novel, a form that has undergone something of a revival in recent years, has found inspiration in the region’s political cataclysms. A powerful style of fiction has emerged that probes subjects relating to freedom, violence, identity, religion and the failure …

A reviewe by Agnes Rotivel, for La Croix, published October 5th, 2015
(…) Here we are again in this mainly Sunni port city in Northern Lebanon – too often overshadowed by the capital Beirut – for which the author confesses a passion. Yet he is born in Zgherta, a Christian Maronite stronghold, 8 km away. “A tough city that made war to Tripoli in 1975,” he recalls, referring to the start of the Lebanese civil war.

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Published by L’Humanité, on October 1st, 2015
The Lebanese author Jabbour Douaihy, professor of French literature at the University of Tripoli, immerses his reader in this city, especially in its American neighborhood, among the poorest, which he describes accurately. He explores everyday life, from the souk’s stalls, to the cries of the vegetable vendors, these “peasants who smell of damp earth in winter,” as well as the old sheikh, the soap and fish merchants, the baker who makes cheese galettes that one can eat standing up, “against the wall, facing the colorful list of the names of the Prophet’s …

This piece is by Alexis Brocas, for the Magazine littéraire, published in September 2015.
Translated excerpts below.
Since Tchen’sattacks  in The Human Condition, terrorism seems a constant theme in contemporary literature — a mirror that we walk along a path bordered by the collective history and the author’s personal history. Three novels came out this autumn, written in various languages, but dealing with this issue using converging narratives.
In The French, Julien Suaudeau recounts the trajectory of a young, clueless, anonymous, young man from Evreux to to the caliphate of Daech — and from petty crime to slaughter. For …

A review by Catherine Simon, for Transfuge, September 15ht, 2015
As its name suggests, the said “American” neighborhood is nested on a hill, overlooking the river and city, has kept nothing from its exotic and opulent past, except the old memory of an Anglican school. The school was eventually closed, squatted by politico-military people, in this case Syrian in this case, while the neighborhood itself was “invaded by the poor neighboring mountains, where growing apricots, or any kind of fruit tree, was no longer enough to feed their families. ” Welcome to Lebanon, homeland of the novelist Jabbour Douaihy.