Posts featuring Ahmed Naji

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Japan, Egypt, and Kenya!

This week, our team from around the world brings news of literary award shortlists and winners! From the launch of the inaugural issue of Debunk Quarterly, to the winners of the Sawiris Cultural Awards, to the recent closure of a historical bookstore in Tokyo, read on to learn more!

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Where are Japan’s bookstores going? In the last two decades, the number of bookstores in Japan has nearly halved, dropping to only 11,495 in 2023. The figure speaks to the many locally-owned bookstores that have had to close over the years, unable to keep customers in a rapidly digitizing era. Some of these closures have garnered international and domestic attention, the latest of which was the historical “Bookshop 書楽” (Shogaku) in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. 

Owned by Mitsuru Ishida, Bookshop Shogaku has a long history in its small corner of Tokyo, located just outside of Asagaya Station for the past 43 years. The area of Asagaya itself—dubbed 文士の街, or “Literati Town”—has been a hub for creatives for well over a century, lined with jazz clubs, Showa-era coffee shops, and of course, bookstores. While famous literary figures such as Dazai Osamu and Masuji Ibuse once frequented the street and its many shelves, playing shogi and drinking as the “Asagaya Club,” over time Bookshop Shogaku became the last bookstore selling new titles in the area, until it closed as well. 

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Leave From or Arrive There: A Conversation with Rima Rantisi

Form offers freedom, but also creativity, another layer through which to see, and ultimately create.

Biography, The University of Hawaii Press’s quarterly academic journal, surveys the contemporary landscape of Lebanese and Arab women’s memoirs. In this, they have named Rima Rantisi as among the champions of “highly intimate personal narratives,” whose work portray their own “constructions of home.” As an essayist, Rantisi inhabits interiorities, taking time in its own tracts, but also incites reexaminations of how we think of (and therefore, how we read and write) the external—places we dwell in all our lives and have always felt ourselves to know. As an editor, she is a nonbeliever of geographic boundaries, welcoming works of art and literature from the ‘Arab-adjacent’ regions. How does she write about home, something ideally stable, when it happens to be a city that is ever-changing and fluid, a mere construct?

In this interview, I asked Rantisi about Rusted Radishes, the Beirut-based multilingual and interdisciplinary journal of art and literature she co-founded; framing the memoir as a genre within place-based writing; and contemporary Arabic and Anglophone literatures written from Lebanon and its diaspora.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is a point in your essay “Waiting” where you write about O’Hare Airport: “Each time I leave from or arrive there, I am away—from people I love, from other homes. I am reaching, always.” Can you speak more about this metaphorical always being away, always on the move

Rima Rantisi (RR): Home is one of those subjects that Lebanese writers and artists are intimately familiar with, and sometimes in ways they prefer not to be. But because of the country’s modern history of war and migration, complex conceptions of home are inevitable. For me, I was raised by Lebanese immigrants in the United States, in the small town of Peoria, Illinois. Later, I made a new home where I went to college in Chicago. And then I moved across the world to Beirut. The move to Beirut is when the ever-present awareness of place began to take form. Not only because it was so different from where I had come from, but also Lebanon now became a new lens to see the world through—including my parents, world politics, my past and future. One place that brings these places together is O’Hare Airport. It had always been exciting for me to travel from there as a Midwesterner, but now it gives me a deeper sense of distance between who I was in the United States, and who I am now in Lebanon. In this sense, “I am away” both physically and metaphorically. One thing we don’t talk about as much is how place changes us; not only does it affect us emotionally, but it changes our perception of the world, and the language we use to communicate it. 

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Intricacies Through Imagination: The Book of Cairo in Review

The Book of Cairo invites us to this very complex city without committing the crime of exoticizing it.

book of cairo

The Book of Cairo, A City in Short Fiction, edited by Raph Cormack, translated from the Arabic by multiple translators, Comma Press, 2019

The Book of Cairo, A City in Short Fiction, edited by Raph Cormack, is the newest addition to the “Reading the City” series published by Comma Press (Manchester, UK), collecting stories by local authors from cities around the world. Each story in the book (like those of the other books in the series) is translated into English by a different translator, which makes the book even more multi-vocal, introducing readers to not only writers, but also to translators working from a particular language into English, in this case Arabic.

The stories (except for one) were originally published between 2013 and 2018, making them of the present time and place, and giving us access into the current literary scene of Cairo. The authors are all born in the late 1970s and the ’80s, which makes them part of the young, hopeful generation who took part in the Tahrir Square protests, who made the Arab Spring possible, and who imagined a different future for their country. And it is through the diverse, imagined worlds in the present collection that they investigate the present moment of a city mutually rooted in history and moving toward the future.

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