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.

Published by World Literature Today, September 2017
Sinan Antoon’s novel, Baghdad Eucharist, translated by Maia Tabet, originally published in Arabic by Al-Kamel Publishers and shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013, is a visceral yet poetic novel about the Iraqi diaspora.

This original contribution by Sinan Antoon was published on March 19th, 2018, in The New York Times.
When I was 12, Saddam Hussein, vice president of Iraq at the time, carried out a huge purge and officially usurped total power. I was living in Baghdad then, and I developed an intuitive, visceral hatred of the dictator early on. That feeling only intensified and matured as I did. In the late 1990s, I wrote my first novel, “I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody,” about daily life under Saddam’s authoritarian regime. Furat, the narrator, was a young college …

Published by Kirkus Reviews, September 13th, 2017
A cross-section of life in one Tripoli neighborhood, from a wealthy resident to a housecleaner to a terrorist. This brisk and affecting novel by veteran Lebanese writer Douaihy (June Rain, 2015, etc.) is set during the early stages of the Iraq War and follows three archetypal characters.