The Latest

What happens on New Year’s Eve when a conservative (and naive) father comes to his son’s front door, in Cairo, and hears something he never expected? A holiday classic from Egyptian writer Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni (1889–1949).

New short fiction by the relentlessly creative Palestinian writer Nasser Rabah.

A classic short story by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani in which wealthy men in Amman tell a Palestinian waiter he should be happy.

“I’ve said it before, and I say it now on this London evening / before it’s too late: / I am the last communist!”

For Sudanese readers living through the current crisis, the following lines by the late Mohammed el-Makkī Ibrahim resonate with striking immediacy, even though they were written in the 1980s. Beneath the layers of grief, a restrained optimism continues to breathe through its lines.

“Marriage is the afterlife / for which we have to cross this life, / leaving behind our homes and pasts, / waiting for justice with a light heart, / where our homes become our graves.”

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Jonathan Wright discuss Wright’s start in literary translation, its divergence from the sort of translation he practiced as a journalist, and his ideas about what he calls Arabic polyglossia.

Several authors who contributed short stories to the collection spoke about their thoughts on the collapse of time, historical continuities and the notion of fighting ideological fantasy with fiction.

This is part of an interview with the Lebanese author Hoda Barakat that took place on September 30 2025. It has been translated from French and edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to the BULAQ episode based on this interview, in which we also discuss Barakat’s unique life journey and works.

“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”