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.

18: Is It a Beach Book?

In our last episode before a summer hiatus, we discuss a graphic novel about the life and art of the stars of Arab music and cinema; Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour’s memoir of studying at university in the United States in the 1970s; and the Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani’s novel The Hospital, out in English (alongside a new poetry collection, The Shutters) after nearly falling into oblivion.

Show notes

A record-breaking four of the 18 “PEN translates” prizes for 2018 are going to books translated from Arabic. They are: The Book of Cairo, edited by Raph Cormack, with various authors and translators; My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury,translated by Humphrey Davies; Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; and The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, also translated by Jaquette.
More about the great Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannouscan be found at the World Theatre Day website.
A Seismography of Struggle: Towards a Global History of Critical and Cultural Magazines is a project of the French National Institute of Art History; an exhibition and talks were recently hosted by Kulte Gallery in Rabat.
The Iraqi comix collectivethat was refused Swiss visasis Mesaha,and you can find more about them on their Facebook page.
Lamia Ziade’s Ô Nuit Ô Mes Yeux is a stylish, charming illustrated text about the larger-than-life lives of Arab musicians. An excerpt titled “Fairouz in my Grandfather’s Shop,” translated into English by Edward Gauvin, appears in the July 2018 Words Without Borders. Ziade’s Bye Bye Babylon has been translated into English by Olivia Snaije.
Another beach read is Radwa Ashour’s The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, translated by Michelle Hartman. Other portraits of the US discussed: Tawfiq al-Hakim in The Revolt of the Young, which has been translated by Mona Radwan; Yusuf Idris’s New York 80; Alaa al-Aswany’s Chicago, which was translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa; Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s Sleeping with Strangers, translated by Chip Rossetti; and Sayyid Qutb.
And—there is some debate over whether this is a beach read—but Moroccan author-filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, translated by Lara Vergnaud, and his The Shutters, translated by Emma Ramadan are newly out from New Directions Books, and get a recommendation both from Ursula and from MLQ.