Arablit.org reviews our March 2015 conversation on contemporary Arabic fiction, which included readings by short-story writers Hassan Blasim and Hisham Bustani.
Admirers of slim, erotically charged novels will greet Noy Holland’s first novel Bird with a sense of discovery. For fans of her three short story collections, Bird is a satisfying evolution of her lyrical, unsettling prose that ratchets the tension between poetic language and mythic narrative, and feels both deeply modern and ancient.
Bird is a ballad to vanished love, to an erotic connection akin to rapture that the main character, whose nickname is Bird, cannot escape, even though Mickey, her golden bad boy lover, took her places she shouldn’t have gone.
The present is one autumn day 12 years after Mickey’s abrupt departure “in order not to kill her.” Bird is breast-feeding her infant daughter after a difficult birth, her second child. She might be suffering from post-partum depression—certainly she has let herself go. Married to the doctor who treated the wounds Mickey inflicted, she lives in the countryside, trying to find solace in domesticity, but yearning for the thrills of the past.
107 Water Street, Stonington, CT
One day I entered this room and wasn’t afraid of ghosts. It was after a friend phoned, spoke in a register that calmed me. But tonight, opening the yellow door with its gold metal sun, there’s a knitting-up in me. As if a spider lives in my throat, wove a web inside my chest. Inner bodice of silk he runs up, pulls. On a pound-for-pound basis spider silk is stronger than steel. Remember that Ivy said the scarlet room always felt occupied.
On our first date he took me to a bar disguised as an apartment. Down a narrow alley (they call them laneways there), up a step, through a door marked “1A.” The room was small and nearly empty, all dark wood and white walls. A fire did its quiet work in one corner, its light gleaming on the unlabeled bottles that lined the shelves. He knew everyone, and the beautiful, tattooed bartenders spoke to me like family.
That Friday, in preparation for the storm, we leave work in the middle of the day. We fill our cars with gasoline, stock up on coffee and alcohol, check out books from the library, and then come home to peer out our windows and stare up at the sky. This is just snow—thin gray streaks of ordinary snow—but I can’t help it: I’m transfixed.
All night on the local news, the broadcasters glimmer with anticipation. More than a foot, they predict, maybe two. They roll through the highways in news vans while warning us to stay inside. They spend several minutes interviewing a woman about the plastic shovel she is standing in line to purchase. They have the happy unhurried look about them that newscasters often do in the days right before Christmas when they have been granted a reprieve from the stories of gunshots and house fires in order to report on Santa Claus and Christmas lights—a momentary pause in which none of us are asked to care about anything larger than what a child would see.
MassLive reports on the upcoming Amherst College 2016 LitFest, which will occur from March 3-5 on the Amherst College campus.
Please join us in greeting new contributors Dolores Hayden and Zack Strait—and a big welcome back to Robin Chapman and Alex Cigale.
Book by SUHEIL BUSHRUI and JAMES MALARKEY
Reviewed by
Suheil Bushrui and James Malarkey’s anthology, Desert Songs of the Night: An Anthology of 1500 years of Arabic Literature, is not aptly named. The romantic title conjures up an image of a bard, reciting poetry and telling stories in the Arabian desert by a fire: the very best poetry and tales from the Arabic literary tradition. In fact, the anthology is a collection of a wide range of texts, reflecting the rich cultural history and thought of Arabic heritage: chivalric verse, political, philosophical, and legal treatises, religious texts, moralistic essays, folktales, travel writing, excerpts from plays and memoirs and modern narrative poetry.
The collection is tempered by the academic backgrounds and interests of the two editors. Suheil Bushrui, who died last year at 84, was a distinguished critic and translator, an authority on Yeats and Kahlil Gibran and the founder and former director of the George and Lisa Zakhem Kahlil Gibran Center for Values and Peace at the University of Maryland. James Malarkey was Professor Emeritus at Antioch University, the former Chair of Humanities and General Education with past stints at universities in Algeria and Beirut. He is an anthropologist, specializing in Algerian politics.
By SAGE CRUSER
My dad’s black mutt slunk up to the front porch, looking slowly back and forth and crouching down low to the ground. I knew that body language: she was unsure of how a gift she had for us would be received. Her mouth was full of something. “Spit it out, girl,” I commanded. She gently separated her jaws and rolled a small brown ball of fur off her tongue. It was a wild baby rabbit, so small that at first I thought it was a mouse. But then I saw its ears and pink nose, and, as any nine-year-old girl would, I jumped and let out a squeak. Then I composed myself by taking a deep breath and patted my dog on the head. “Good girl, Macy. I’ve got it from here.”
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