Place: Palestine

The Burden of History: A Review of Batool Abu Akleen’s 48kg

September 17, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou

48kg . . . does not hide the Zionist intention behind abstractions, but rather confronts us with the stark realities of a genocidal war.

48kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen, Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher, Palestine, Tenement Press, June 2025

Batool Abu Akleen’s bilingual collection of poems, 48kg, is not solely a powerful literary work; rather, it is a testimony of the genocide that has been wrought upon Gaza for the past two years, written in a poetic verse and style. Her writing is urgent, heart-breaking, honest, and brutal; every line lingers long after reading.

A blend between personal witness and poetic verse, the collection was translated from the Arabic by Akleen herself along with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher. The close collaboration ensured that the urgency of her voice was not lost in translation. Indeed, her first-hand experience of the genocidal war on Gaza is not hidden in gentle language, and the bilingual nature of the text puts the original Arabic side-by-side with its English counterparts. In translation, Akleen endeavors to convey her experience of genocide to a broader, non-Arabic speaking audience.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2025

September 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 12, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield and Carol Khoury

The latest in literary news from Nigeria and Palestine!

This week, our editors report on the literature that testifies to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, new initiatives to promote writing from the Global Majority, and exciting technological initiatives to preserve heritage and indigenous languages across Africa.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

PEN’s spotlight on Palestinian literature is more vibrant than ever. In a recent dispatch, we featured Children of the Dew by Palestinian writer Mohammed Al-As‘ad, soon arriving in English thanks to translators maia tabet and Anaheed Al-Hardan, and the upcoming anthology Palestine – 1 (Comma Press, October 2025), which reimagines the 1948 Nakba through speculative fiction. Now, English PEN and the Booker Prize Foundation have announced the six winners of the brand-new “PEN Presents x International Booker Prize,” designed to support translators from the Global Majority. Among the winners are two Arabic-language books: the Sudanese title Ireme by Stella Gaitano, translated by Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom, and the Palestinian title Playing with Soldiers by Tariq Asrawi, translated by Anam Zafar. As both Sudan and Palestine are sites of enduring crimes against humanity (to say the least), this announcement reminds us that literature is a profound test of our shared humanity. Both works have world English rights available, promising more stories—not only devastating news—for global audiences.

While Gaza City may be facing unimaginable challenges as we read and write these lines, the people of Gaza are definitely not off the map; they’re not “there,” they’re very much “here.” They’re making their voices heard loud and clear through literature that bursts with resilience and hope. Further evidence of this exists in We Are Still Here: An Anthology of Resilience, Grief, and Unshattered Hope from Gaza’s University Students, which gathers raw, courageous stories, poems, essays, and testimonies from students now living through unimaginable trauma. Edited by Jacob Norris and Zahid Pranjol, these pieces are like snapshots of real-time courage, proving that words can be a powerful act of survival and hope. READ MORE…

A Marred and Martyred Language: An Interview with Ahmad Almallah on Writing from the Borderlands

August 27, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

For you to understand poetry, you must see the human action it reflects and the one that gave it form on the page.

Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s second collection, Border Wisdom, is a searing love song of longing, memory, and language. It is a heart-wrenching evocation of the poet’s mother, Nawal, and of the poet’s own identity, familial lineage, and their occupied homeland. Woven with epigraphs from Ahmad Shawqi and Emily Dickinson, the collection propels itself smoothly between English and Arabic with erasure poetry, Arabic khatt, shape-poems, and English prose that chart the poet’s topographies of Philadelphia, Beirut, Vermont, and Bethlehem, along with the reimagined terrain of his mother’s Amman and al-Khalil. 

Border Wisdom pulsates with the poet’s estrangements: from his home, from his father, from the contours of his own memory. And echoing through as though an aftershock is a disclosure from the book’s last few pages: “Dear reader, I’ve been pretending all along to have a second language. Actually/in reality/basically/essentially/ I don’t know anything in Arabic.” 

In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Almallah about Border Wisdom, mistranslations, and his labyrinthine poetics of negotiation between Arabic and English.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Border Wisdom, was published by Winter Editions in 2023. How did the poems in this collection come together over time? And what has the experience of sharing this work with the world been like for you?

Ahmad Almallah (AA): The poems began to come together before and after my mother’s disappearance from this world. The world of borders did not allow me to be by her side in her final hours. It was in 2021; I was trying to be there for her but the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) launched a large operation to quell protests over kicking people out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza ended up being hit the hardest as Israel was flexing its military power on innocent Palestinians as has been for seventy-seven years now.

At that point, I chose to leave the West Bank to be with my family in the US. A week after that I got news that my mother was no longer of the living. I was advised not to go back. I found myself flipping through the poems of Emily Dickinson and I happened on the line “there is a finished feeling at the grave.” It was then that I decided to go back to Palestine. The first thing that came to my mind when I walked into the room where my mother spent the final days of her life was that she was not dead. She had just disappeared. And the same thought stayed with me when I visited her grave. I wasn’t there to witness her body put in the ground. This is when I began to hold onto the idea of disappearance as an alternative to death. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

August 11, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eric Bies, Justin Goodman, Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 8, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Christina Chatzitheodorou, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Palestine, North Macedonia, and Greece!

This week, our editors bring news of new publications continuing long-running literary genealogies, notable awardees of the PEN Translates grants, and the process of turning a lauded Greek writer’s home into an exhibition space. 

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Going back to one’s roots can be an exercise of remembering what moves us. In her novel Tri Marii (The Three Marias), published recently by Ars Lamina Press, Macedonian author Olivera Kjorveziroska examines multiple iterations of the origin concept: as literary influence, as folk practice, and as the force from and towards which all human life is drawn—love.

Originally from Kumanovo, Kjorveziroska (b. 1965) now lives and works in Skopje. Her writing has been translated into many languages, including English, French, Hungarian, and Albanian, among others, and she also works as an editor and literary critic. Being someone who reads for a living is a crucial aspect of Kjorveziroska’s life; in her own words: “If . . . I had to choose between doing something else and writing a lot more, or working in publishing and not writing at all, I would probably choose the latter, because this is the only industry I feel at home in.” This love of and proficiency in reading finds its embodiment in her writing, including in Tri Marii, which is intertextual and allusive both literarily and culturally. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 20, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Carol Khoury, MARGENTO, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Palestine, Kenya, and Romania!

This week, our editors-at-large take us from memorial ceremonies in Kenya to a colloquium in Brussels, exploring the life and legacy of celebrated literary figures, exciting prize nominations, and cross-cultural events. Read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Palestinian writer and poet Ibrahim Nasrallah has been nominated to the longlist for the 2026 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, better known as the “American Nobel” for its global reputation and the extent of its sway in the world of literature. Nasrallah’s much-acclaimed novel, Time of White Horses, stands as the only Arabic-language novel among this year’s nine distinguished finalists, another significant achievement for Arabic literature in the international arena.

Presented biannially by the University of Oklahoma’s World Literature Today, the Neustadt Prize recognizes outstanding literary achievement in all genres and languages. The winner, who will receive a $50,000 award, will be announced at the Neustadt Lit Fest in October 2025.

Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses is a sweeping narrative charting the course of Palestine from the twilight of Ottoman rule to the earth-shattering convulsions of the 1948 Nakba, all refracted through the lens of an imaginary village. The book, celebrated for its blend of documentary realism and imaginative storytelling, has previously been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and is celebrated for its nuanced analysis of collective memory and identity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 23, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us into the inner workings of the literary scenes in Palestine and Kenya. From the debut of Gaza Publications, a publication dedicated to the promotion and protection of Palestinian stories, to the rich and discursive literary salons of Nairobi, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

A new publishing house, Gaza Publications (manshurat gazza), has been launched by Palestinian writer and editor Husam Maarouf, aiming to safeguard Palestinian narratives threatened by erasure amid ongoing conflict. Maarouf, speaking from Gaza, emphasized that the project was born out of “the fear of obliteration and the erasures that threaten the Palestinian story,” particularly the untold testimonies of those who lived through the 1948 Nakba and subsequent wars.

The Gaza Publications team includes Maarouf as founder and director, visual artist Lamis Al Sharif as consultant and coordinator, and Yemeni designer Nina Amer. Despite severe challenges—including war, frequent internet outages, and communication barriers—the team remains committed to amplifying Palestinian voices, especially those shaped by the harsh realities of Gaza.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 18, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Kathryn Raver, and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest literary news from Palestine, France, and the United States!

This week, our editors take us behind-the-scenes at book festivals, from a festival spotlighting Latin American literature in Los Angeles to Paris’s Festival du Livre. From workshops on reimagining fairytales to a look at the only Palestinian-owned publishing house in America, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

Beneath the glittering glass ceiling of the Grand Palais, Paris welcomed over 114,000 attendees for its fourth annual Festival du Livre last weekend. The festival is a hub for publishing professionals and book lovers alike, promoting both Francophone and international literature to French-speaking readers and offering insights into the literary and cultural landscape of today.

Among an extraordinarily diverse selection of programming, a few of my personal favorites included a workshop on reimagining classic fairytales and a seminar on resisting the language of fascism—an examination of far-right language and how it is actively influencing popular discourses “blurring traditional political markers and weakening collective memory.”

Thousands of authors and publishers took part in the festival, as they do every year. Among them was Moroccan-French author Leila Slimani, whose previous works have been highly praised and have even been awarded prestigious prizes like the Prix Goncourt (Chanson douce, 2016). Slimani’s newest novel, J’emporterai le feu, was released in January of this year and concludes her Le Pays des autres trilogy.

In fact, Moroccan literature was the festival’s special cultural focus this year. Thirty-two publishers of Moroccan voices were present at the festival, most of them taking part in one of the many events offered at the Moroccan Pavilion—a dedicated space designed to highlight the country’s multilingual literary tradition and its “image as a cultural crossroads between tradition and modernity.” The events included a number of creative writing workshops, author talks, and even a seminar on translation and cultural reception of the Moroccan novel.

The Festival du Livre wasn’t the only event on which French readers could slake their thirst this month. Hors Limites, a festival hosted by the Association Bibliothèques en Seine Saint-Denis, seeks to highlight contemporary literature and address reading as a dialogue between creators and consumers. This festival, though smaller, still featured dozens of workshops and author meetings in Ile-de-France.

Among the authors present was Palestinian author Karim Kattan (whose 2021 interview with Asymptote can be found here). Kattan’s most recent novel, Eden à l’aube, was recently awarded the 2024 Prix de la Cagnotte. An English translation of his first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, was recently released by Foundry Editions. READ MORE…

What’s New In Translation: April 2025

April 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Dan Shurley, Eric Bies, Liliana Torpey, and Xiao Yue Shan

New titles from Brazil, Portugal, Switzerland, Colombia, Norway, Italy, Palestine, Cuba, Peru, Japan, Afghanistan, and Germany!

The brevity of a transcendent ecopoetics, a fierce diagnosis of the contemporary art world, the psychological torture of a toxic relationship, a gathering of formidable Afro-Brazilian voices. . . This month, we are delighted to introduce fifteen new works from around the world, from the intimate to the twisted, the reverent to the radical, of healing and breaking, of what goes on within us and between us.

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 Apparent Breviary by Gastón Fernández, translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia, World Poetry Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Rhythm in poetry, Yeats told us, serves to “prolong the moment of contemplation—the moment when we are both asleep and awake” by balancing a monotonous formula of language with the surprise of new images, ideas. In his metered perfection, he reminded us that we are innately rhythmic creatures, alive by the steady pace of breath and heartbeat, habit-forming and fond of repetition, and every interruption to this enduring pattern is a miniature shock, a fracture, a revival.

The hundred poems in Gastón Fernández’s Apparent Breviary are full of interruptions: huge, gasping chasms of silence throwing poetic rhythm into some archaic past. A few pages in, I understood why their translator, KM Cascia, had admitted that the poems made them “squirm.” They unsettled me too. With no guiding cadence to the words, no comfort of the steady pulse, with language disorientating in its skeleton arrangement, there is a sense of learning how to read again, examining each word set firmly on its own—rare stars in the page’s matte sky. Max Picard had once brought up the idea that language is too self-conscious: “each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front than to the silence.” In Fernández, this isn’t so; here, language is conscious of its origin and reverent of its silent surroundings, and as soon as one acknowledges this fact, the vacancy of the negative spaces on the page begin to seem inviting. Instead of being read as simply text, there is something of Apparent Breviary that demands to be interpreted as score, in which the nothingness is full of measures, divisions, momentum. The poet demands we notice that the emptiness is alive: it breathes. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 14, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Ibrahim Fawzy

The latest from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Egypt!

This week, our editors report on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a profound new collaboration drawing attention to the “obliteration” in Gaza, and a movement highlighting women writers and creators in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

Last month, the six-book shortlist for the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) was announced at a press conference held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. The honored books includes two authors previously recognized by the prize: Azher Jirjees, shortlisted in 2023 for The Stone of Happiness after being longlisted in 2020, and Taissier Khalaf, longlisted in 2017 for The Slaughter of the Philosophers. Ahmed Fal Al Din, Mohamed Samir Nada, Nadia Najar, and Haneen Al-Sayegh are first-time IPAF nominees.

The shortlist for this eighteenth edition of the IPAF was revealed by this year’s Chair of Judges, Egyptian academic Mona Baker. She was joined by fellow judges—Moroccan academic and critic Said Bengrad, Emirati critic and academic Maryam Al Hashimi, Lebanese researcher and academic Bilal Orfali, and Finnish translator Sampsa Peltonen—as well as IPAF Chair of Trustees Professor Yasir Suleiman, Prize Administrator Fleur Montanaro, and Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Professor Ahmed Zayed. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 14, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Miranda Mazariegos

Dispatches on the latest in literature from Palestine, Sweden, and Colombia!

In this week’s roundup, from Palestine is a report on the recent raid of a Palestinian bookstore in Jerusalem; from Sweden, the nominees for a prestigious literary award; and from Latin America, coverage of the most recent edition of the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

In a striking escalation of censorship and cultural suppression, the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem—a revered institution for intellectual exchange and a cultural cornerstone for Palestinians—was the target of an Israeli police raid. Exactly three years ago (read the AWS dispatch here), this gem on Salah al-Deen al-Ayoubi street was celebrated for its role in publishing the first-ever Arabic edition of Granta, titled “Escape.” Today, however, the narrative has shifted from escape to arrest.

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What’s New in Translation: January 2025

January 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Christopher Higgs, Henry Gifford, Jordan Silversmith, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

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Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 3, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Carol Khoury, and MARGENTO

Literary updates from Japan, Palestine, and airports in Ireland and France.

Only three days into 2025, the Asymptote team is hard at work reporting on literature across the globe. In the first roundup of the year, our staff introduces a thirty-one day reading challenge of Japanese short stories, the liminal thoughts of a busy poet in European airports, and a look back on the numerous achievements of Palestinian writers throughout 2024.

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

It’s often said that short stories and collections thereof sell poorly in the publishing market—and what a shame! There’s something about the short story, its attention to detail, the palpable shift between acts, the transience of characters and settings, that has made up some of the most impressive pieces of literature. Particularly in Japan, the short story has historically been a dominant mode of writing, pioneered by the “father of the Japanese short story” Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and is still today one of the most common genres seen in bookstores around the country.

To our delight, much of this oeuvre has been translated into English, and Read Japanese Literature (RJL), an extensive online resource for Japanese literature, has created a list of thirty-one Japanese short stories in translation available to read for free online—one for every day of January—in celebration of #JanuaryinJapan. These stories range from the great Akutagawa’s “Dreams,” a chilling and meandering tale of a paranoid artist, to Kenji Miyazawa’s satirical “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque commentary on posturing and westernization following the Meiji period. Many of these stories and authors are also discussed in detail in the RJL Podcast, including deep dives into authors such as Osamu Dazai and Izumi Suzuki, historical context, and more. 

If this is your first time hearing of this month’s reading challenge, don’t despair. We’re only three days into the month, and it won’t take you long to catch up—the stories are short, after all.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

2024 has been a tragic year for the Palestinian; still, Palestinian authors made significant strides in the literary world, garnering prestigious awards and recognition on both regional and international stages.

In April, imprisoned novelist Basim Khandaqji won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Booker Prize) for his novel A Mask, the Colour of the Sky. His brother Youssef and publisher Rana Idris accepted the award in Abu Dhabi. Nabil Suleiman, chair of the judging committee, confirmed that the decision was unanimous. Moroccan writer Yassin Adnan, who hosted the ceremony, emphasized that Khandaqji’s win highlights literature’s ability to transcend borders.

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