News and Events

July 2, 2025

Talin Suciyan, author of Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces was interviewed by Ari Barbalat on the New Books Network. Summary: The history of Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire has largely been narrated as a unique period of equality, reform, and progress, often framing it as the backdrop to modern Turkey. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s exhortation ...

July 2, 2025

We Never Swim in the Same River Twice by Hassouna Mosbahi and translated was recently reviewed by World Literature Today “Mosbahi’s high reputation as a novelist will not be hurt by this very readable work, which gives a vivid if not especially pleasant picture of post–Arab Spring Tunisia; nor will anyone but the most intransigent of ...

June 16, 2025

When Harry met Wally, the result was a definitive book on how to watch television by Rick Kogan They were young wide-eyed students when they met at Northwestern University. Walter Podrazik was from Bridgeport and Harry Castleman from Boston and it did not take them long to discover that they shared a passion for The Beatles. They ...

May 22, 2025

Empires in Friction: Egypt in the Sixteenth Century by Nelly Hanna was reviewed in the latest issue of Choice. “A compellingly revised history of Ottoman Egypt’s transformation from a turbulent, newly conquered, formerly Mamluk territory in 1517 to a bureaucratically regulated, financially productive Ottoman province in the last decades of the 16th century.” Read the full review

April 24, 2025

Fadi Zaghmout’s forthcoming novel The Man of Middling Height is included in Bookstr’s round up of Amazing Arab Sci-Fi Authors You Need to Read.

April 2, 2025

Ibtisam Azem discusses The Book of Disappearance on Electric Lit. The book  grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon’s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel. Read the ...

April 2, 2025

Ofra Amihay author of The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel was interviewed on New Books Network by Ari Barbalat. Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography and shows how the presence of ...

March 4, 2025

Ibtisam Azem’s novel The Book of Disappearance, translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon, has been longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. The prize, which is awarded annually, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

March 4, 2025

Gregory Castle, Sarah Townsend, and Matt Reznicek, editors of The Irish Bildungsroman were interviewed on New Books Network’s Literary Studies channel.

January 30, 2025

Sumita Pahwa’s recent book Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers was reviewed in the International Journal of Middle East Studies.