What was so controversial aboutChildren of the Alley, leading to it beingbanned for years in Egypt and to an attempt on the author’s life? How and when was it...

All this season, we will be doing short book-quiz episodes with prizes donated by ten distinguished publishers. In this bonus episode, we give the answer to the question from...

She was an outsider, an experimenter, a “rebel realist” and a feminist. You may not have read the short stories of Malika Moustadraf (1969-2006), since her work fell out...

Egypt’s January 25 revolution was 11 years ago. Since then many of its young leaders have been persecuted and the history of what happened distorted or denied. We look...

The Book of Ramallah collects stories set in and around Palestine’s administrative capital, which, Maya Abu Al-Hayat writes in her introduction, “represents this mirage, this glimmer of hope that...

Raph Cormack is author ofMidnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring ‘20s, which chronicles the lives of many of Egypt’s biggest stars of the early twentieth century. Show...

For our end-of-year book list, we made up our own categories — from “best poet I hadn’t heard of before” ” to “best book about cannibalism” to “best book...

We talk to scholar Elias Muhanna about translating a magical, delightful eighteenth-century travelogue. In 1707 Hanna Diyab journeyed from his native Aleppo as translator to a rapacious and sometimes...

We look at new writing from Syria and about the experiences of Syrian refugees, including Ramy Al-Asheq’s Ever Since I Did Not Die, a book he categorizes not as...