BULAQ: The Arab world in books

The latest episodes of BULAQ are available on the Sowt website. You can subscribe to the podcast using this RSS feed or on iTunes.

BULAQ is a podcast about contemporary writing from and about the Middle East and North Africa. It looks at the Arab region through the lens of literature and at literature through the lens of current events.

BULAQ is co-hosted by Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey. Its first season was produced by Issandr El Amrani. It is now co-produced with the Sowt network in Amman.

BULAQ is named after a neighborhood of Cairo that hosted the first active printing press in the region. Established in 1820, the Bulaq Press put out its first publication, an Italian-Arabic dictionary, in 1822.

MLQ is a book critic, editor, ghostwriter, and literary consultant with a focus on Arab and Arabic literatures, particularly as they intersect with translation. She runs the blog ArabLit.

Ursula is a journalist and book critic who writes about education, literature, and politics in the Arab world. She contributes to The New York Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Times, The Point and The Arabist blog.

Both Ursula and MLQ spent many years living in Cairo and in Rabat, Morocco. Today Ursula lives in Amman and the podcast is a long-distance conversation.

15: Alexandria When?

Inspired by a fiery essay by an Egyptian professor, Ursula and MLQ discuss cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, and literary representations of the city of Alexandria. Marcia also talks about three new books – from Iraq, Southern Sudan and Lebanon/London. She loved two of them.

Show notes:

May Hawas’s essay How Not to Write on Cosmopolitan Alexandria takes as its starting point Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and particularly the first book, Justine.
The renowned poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy has shaped Alexandria’s literary image and aura. Ibrahim Abdelmeguid is perhaps Egypt’s best-known Alexandria-focused author (read his No One Sleeps in Alexandria, for instance, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab), although Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar may the best-known book set in the city. Other major Alexandrian writers include Alaa Khaled and the late Edwar al-Kharrat. Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s St. Theresa, trans. Chip Rossetti, is, in part, about the 1960s expulsions from Alexandria. MLQ admits to not being a fan of Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel, sorry.
Marwan Hisham’s memoir-reportage Brothers of the Gun, with art by Molly Crabapple, came out May 15. It details life under the Islamic State in Raqqa and covers, from a quite different point of view, some of the same ground as DunyaMikhail’s The Beekeper, which we discussed in Episode 8.
Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Occasional Virgin, trans. Catherine Cobham, comes out June 15.
Stella Gaitano’s Withered Flowers, trans. Anthony Calderbank, is available in bookshops in Juba, South Sudan. We’ll also see if we can convince them to make it more widely available.