Join internationally known writers, editors, and translators for a lively conversation.
What themes, styles, and innovative collaborations are emerging in Middle Eastern fiction? What linguistic, political, and cultural opportunities and challenges do Arabic writers and their editors face in translating and publishing new works?
Reception to follow.
In the Paris Métro last summer, heading to the Chatelet station on my way home after a wayward day, I caught the sound of a saxophone and that familiar melody from decades past, Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur. I could tell the music was coming from a source close by, perhaps only a few rows behind me. I froze, not knowing what to do as though I were in the grip of something large and timeless.
Book by MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Reviewed by
“For a town, it wasn’t such a bad place,” observes Lila, a transient passing through Gilead, who ends up staying to marry an old widowed minister; she’s also the character for whom Marilynne Robinson has titled her most recent novel. Lila is Robinson’s third book to examine the lives and devotions of a small group of characters in this secluded Christian prairie town in Southwest Iowa. While each book is an independent work, shining on its own—Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and Home won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a National Book Award finalist—the overlapping narratives weave a complex tapestry of the human experience as it relates to personal faith.
To exist humanly, is to name the world, to change it. ~Paulo Freire
When I was 19 my full-time job was bartending a pub called Filthy McNasty’s. McNasty’s sat on Rose Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the roughest streets in the city center at the time. Fights punctuated each hour of the night and later, after I’d moved on up from McNasty’s, a friend was stabbed near there in a skinhead-like attack. Indoors, customers called me “Garth” because of my wild, unkempt hair, like Garth in Wayne’s World. I didn’t wear makeup and favored baggy jeans and t-shirts; I guess this made me infuriatingly gender ambiguous. My fellow bartenders, with their straightened, bleached-blonde hair, penciled-on brows and figure-hugging polyester tolerated Garth to the best of their abilities, aside from one woman, whose actual name I don’t remember, but whose tan outfits—tight pants and jacket—and extremely thick accent conjured the name “Tanner” in my mind. This word, Tanner, also captured the sound of her voice. She clearly despised me/Garth. She would sashay away from us when the bar wasn’t full enough to force us close together. We could barely understand one another’s accents so the physical distance was a welcome relief.
Arabic Literature (in English) has announced that Issue 06 contributor Hisham Bustani is a co-winner of the University of Arkansas Award for the Translation of Arabic Literature, for his third book, The Perception of Meaning, translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes.
This month, we’re pleased to offer seven new poems by several returning and new contributors.
Land sakes is what we’re always exclaiming, because land is all we’re good for, all the sakes there are or ever will be. Each of us, fifty or so strong, has left a country crowded with kin or else lorded over, every inch of the land spoken for, down to the last hop of hare or squawk of fowl.
With JANE SATTERFIELD
Your name: Jane Satterfield
Current city: Baltimore, MD
How long have you lived here? Except for years in Iowa and England, I’ve lived in Maryland most of my life. Though I’ve lived in Charm City for 23 years, I’m a bit of a homebody so my imagination runs backward to the places I lived growing up: the sprawling farmland of Frederick county that runs along the Catoctin Mountain chain; the sprawl of suburban tract land along the D.C. Beltway.
You are that boy. The boy I met in Switzerland while herding my siblings up the long, steep hill to the closest school cafeteria for our free lunch.
It took me exactly two hours. Two hours for most Swiss children to go home to a hot lunch and a motherly kiss. Two hours for non-Swiss me to make my way across town, pick up my brother and sisters at their school and coax them all up that hill, to get them fed, then back down to drop them off and then catch a city bus to my own school, and my breath, if I have money that day.
Book by JOSEPH KERTES
Reviewed by
How to depict human suffering, especially that of children? This question is at the heart of Joseph Kertes’s haunting novel, The Afterlife of Stars, which tells the story of a family fleeing the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary to crush the anti-Communist revolution from the point of view of young Robert Beck, 9.8 years old but “born old,” as his Parisian aunt tells him when she meets him for the first time. Kertes, like Robert, escaped with his family across Europe and eventually settled in Canada, though he was only five at the time. Kertes, whose previous novel, Gratitude, won both the National (U.S.) and Canadian Jewish Book Awards, might have written a memoir, but writing a novel allowed him to tell this story in a lyric, dreamlike prose. This may have been the best way for this author to convey in a literary, adult voice such an early trauma.
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