View of Bulaq quarter, Cairo. HAY, Robert, Esq. Illustrations of Cairo, London, Tilt and Bogue, 1840.

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.

9: On Good Bad Reviews

In which we discuss the validity and necessity of the negative review (or what we like to simply call critical engagement); how rare it is to find negative reviews these days; and the shift that has seen Western reviewers of Arabic literature move from one extreme to another. But is it more condescending to dismiss outright or to offer all-around encouragement?

Show notes

Hisham Aidi's lovely portrait and critical re-evaluation of Juan Goytisolo was published by MERIP “Juan Goytisolo: Tangier, Havana and the Treasonous Intellectual.” For non-subscribers (and everyone should consider supporting this excellent publication!), a version can be found on academia.edu. And here is Aidi’s piece in The Nation: “Is Morocco Headed Toward Insurrection?”
Ursula also recommends Aidi’s Rebel Music (2014) which she wrote about here.
Rafia Zakaria penned “In Praise of Negative Reviews.” It references both Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which ran in Harper’s in 1959 and Kristina Marie Darling’s more recent “Readerly Privilege and Textual Violence: An Ethics of Engagement.”
Marcia has written on Arablit about John Updike’s infamous dismissal of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, from a time when negative reviews of Arabic literature were more than common.
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (“Arabic Booker”) shortlist was announced on February 21. The biggest controversy was around the inclusion of Shahed al-Rawi’s The Baghdad Clock, which is forthcoming in translation by Luke Leafgren in May (US) and June (UK).