Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

March 2008

The Groves of Lebanon

The Silence of the Outcasts: An Interview with Dacia Maraini
(Pescasseroli, Easter 2005) To meet with Dacia Maraini and speak with her in peace means going up to the bitter and severe lands of Abruzzo where the writer, who lives in Rome, takes refuge during holidays…
Translated from Italian
The Dragon of Rabieh
By Alexandre Najjar
Based on actual eventsInspector Sharbel Barud was picking his teeth while listening to the firemen’s explanations. This case was starting to get on his nerves. For the past five days he had been…
Translated from French by Laurie Wilson
Dinner Party in Beirut
By Sélim Nassib
The druggist has closed up shop without a word to anyone, the scoundrel, and it’s not even five o’clock. Am I to wait here on the sidewalk like this, with my legs swelling? His shutter is…
Translated from French by Michael Reynolds
Crazy Zarifé
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
It was because of a star that appeared between the Great Bear and the Little Bear that the goats in a village in northern Lebanon ate the French essays of the eighth-grade primary class.Engrossed in watching…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
The Garden of the One
The snail is necessary the bindweed is necessary The cold leaves and their dew The walls too placed in the light And our hands' weaving in the light Beneath the etched white angle of the almond trees…
Translated from French
Cadaver
I gaze at my corpse where it lies and I find myself beautiful. Beautiful as a wounded legend. Beautiful as only someone else can be. I gaze at my corpse and my corpse is a wire. I am its acrobat, its…
Translated from French
from “Scenes from the Silent Movies”
By Julio Llamazares
Balancing the World on His Chin The posters advertising movies or dances were not the only ones that occasionally clamored for our attention from Olleros’ walls and tree trunks. Sometimes, too,…
Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
from “Colomba”
By Dacia Maraini
A character knocked on the door of the woman with short hair. Tapping timidly with her knuckles, the character entered the room without making a sound. She’s a modestly dressed mountain woman. On…
Translated from Italian by Gregory Conti
from “October 27, 2003”
By Etel Adnan
“Etel Adnan’s language takes the reader on passages that thread in and out of their own feelings, their own consciousness.”—Diana Abu Jaber
Translated from French by C. Dickson
from “Origins”
In Origins, Amin Maalouf recounts the family history of the generation of his paternal grandfather, Botros Maalouf. Maalouf sets out to discover the truth about why Botros, a poet and educator in Lebanon,…
Translated from French
Texterminators
By Mai Ghoussoub
As far as Bullet and his companions were concerned, these volumes were made of paper, and paper is good for warming their feet.
Can Xue: This New Literature has an Old Soul
A New Talent From China Posits Mind Over Matter by Alexis Almeida For all of you literary thrill-seekers, clamoring to uncover yet another author in whose dizzying cerebral mindplay you will delight,…