Literature and Arts from the Center of the World
The Wrong End of the Telescope a novel by Rabih Alameddine Grove Atlantic (Sept 2021) ISBN 9780802157805 Dima Alzayat When in 2018 director Lena Dunham announced she had been hired… Continue reading The Limits of Empathy in Rabih Alameddine’s Refugee Saga
In this excerpt from the Amazigh-Moroccan novel "Cactus Girls" by Karima Ahdad, a fierce small-town girl from the Rif named Sonya remembers what it was like growing up under the spell of heroic women. Like the cactus of the title, Ahdad’s women are survivors in a barren landscape, one filled…
Omar El Akkad, author of American War and What Strange Paradise, looks at 20 years of blowback.
For a brutally honest look at what it’s been like to run a business and raise a family in Cairo these past twenty years, read Diwan’s founder Nadia Wassef’s “Shelf Life” How a labor of love consumes, challenges and fills her life with questions whose answers are often on the…
Nektaria Anastasiadou weaves a rich tale of thwarted love between Sephardic and Rum residents of Istanbul.
Aimée Papazian Art and text by Aimée Papazian; photos by Stephen Ironside “Voyage of Lost Keys,” a permanent art installation recently installed in the Fayetteville Public Library in Arkansas,… Continue reading Voyage of Lost Keys, an Armenian art installation
Hadani Ditmars The commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 unfolds in televisual real time and yet with a strange sense of suspended animation, as if we’re on a slow… Continue reading 20 Years Ago This Month, 9/11 at Souk Ukaz
Aomar Boum, guest editor of TMR’s COMIX issue, heralds the work of master cartoonist Abdelaziz Mouride in mentoring a new generation of Moroccan artists.
The Lebanese cartoonist and BD historian George “Jad” Khoury gives an in-depth overview of contemporary comix across the Arab world.
Algeria’s leading cartoonist reminisces on his start in bandes dessinées in Algeria, Poland and France.
Anthropologist and comix author Sherine Hamdy provides a brief overview of new and recent Arab & Middle Eastern women’s political cartooning.
Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik describes the journey of the queer French couple across Mauritania that will be the basis for a new graphic novel.
Novelist and university professor Jenny White creates a graphic novel on 1970s Turkey with illustrator Ergün Gündüz.
During the long Gaddafi years, Libya produced many exiles, among them the satirical cartoonist and illustrator Hasan “Alsatoor” Dhaimish.
Amber Sackett analyzes the popular French cartoonist Jacques Ferrandez’s series depicting colonial Algeria under the French.