I’ve chosen a life where I should be illiterate like my mother.

Ghosts and all they represent lurk perennially in the universal consciousness and in literature around the world.

So he passed most of that night under the corpse.

These authors are doing important things in post-independence Moroccan writing, a period fueled with a new energy, vitality, and honesty.

So, nichts pairs of pants and Europe awaits me at nine o’clock sharp.

I will paint my death on a canvas of autumn

You tell her things she isn’t supposed to hear.

But the world that had disappeared around me has returned.

The blooming petals: a navel.

Her best years were burnt to ash by a searing fidelity to the memory of her dead husband.

I would like to hide in your kiss.

One folded like a switchblade, one open like a book

His dreams were full of his future invasions of all those blonde women’s beds.

Those people there have broken off all ties to God or humanity!

They were under arrest because they didn't have enough money to do business with the cops.

The spurting blood only excited him more.

Grandmother watched from afar, hidden behind the door, curious as a cat but fearing the devil and the jinns that hide inside European machines.

There, where my body seemed to lay a great distance from me, I put my hand on my leg, on my fingers, and I couldn't tell they were mine.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: La remontee des cendres (The Rising of the Ashes) is the title of a small text, written in French by the Paris-based Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun. It was published by Editions…

A woman . . . foreign . . . was murdered, he replied out of breath as he was tying his faded necktie.

Malik Ben weighed 300 pounds on the day he decided to have his name removed from the Yellow Pages.

Chaïbane began to chew. Taken aback, he mused: everything's edible, even love.

If you can't remember, he threatened, we'll have to go to the station to talk this over in peace and quiet.

What sounds like a call for silence-shhh!-is really the sound of the wind in the trees, a rumor whispered through the leaves by many tongues.