RANDA JARRAR

From El-Ahram:

Cinema is an expression of modernity, and the decrease in the attention dedicated to the cinema as part of the national Egyptian culture is an indication of the crisis of modernity in Egypt. The size of the celebration of the anniversary or any occasion is no proof of regression, rather that Egypt is the only country in the world which produced over 3,000 feature films, and almost as many short films, yet remains without a cinematheque where at least one copy of each of them can be found, even if such copies will be on VHS or DVD.

I don’t know what is more tragic: the above quoted paragraph, or the fact that the new Alexandria Library does not have access to a 35mm projector.

Go here for a list of the top 100 Egyptian films in order of production.

From BBC: Hamas Reverse on Schoolbook Ban

(Thanks to Selina for link)

In the coming three weeks, I have to:

Hand in my manuscript
Finish translating a novel
Write a 20-page paper
Hand in two grant proposals
Oh… and care for my child and my sick cat

Posting will be light…

What a pleasant surprise to come home from AWP and find the new anthology, Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers in my mail box. It’s a gorgeous volume, with work by under-read international writers from 20 countries, each introduced by authors like Anton Shammas, Ha Jin, Ahdaf Soueif, Aleksander Hemon, Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, Naguib Mahfouz, and more. My translation of Iraqi writer Jabbar Yassin Hussin’s story, a riff on Avveroes, is in it with an introduction by Alberto Manguel. Get a copy today.

What if this had happened at AWP instead of at an Iraqi book market?

The panel went really well! Most of the questions afterwards were great, so it isn’t entirely fair to title this post in this way, but it’s fun.

I spoke about recent Arab American fiction, my own publishing process, and the dearth of Arab American bildungsromans, a lack I hope to remedy soon (How Franzen of me to talk about a problem and offer my work as a solution. Ha!).

Khaled Mattawa and Hayan Charara, two of my favorite guys and Arab American poets, hung out afterwards:

It was wonderful…