“Of Wood and Hallucination”—fiction from Mansoura Ez-Eldin
After the war, a few scant survivors become one with the elements, and one takes to writing down thousands of words a day in an invented language.
Mansoura Ez-Eldin
Mansoura Ez-Eldin منصورة عز الدين (fiction; nonfiction, editor; Egypt), nominated by Beirut39 among the 39 Best Arab-language Writers Under 40, is an award-winning and widely translated author of 10 books. -خطوات في شنغهاي [Walks in Shanghai: on the Meaning of Distance Between Egypt and China] won the 2021 Ibn Battuta Prize for travel literature; in 2014, the Sharjah International Book Fair nominated her جبل الزمرد [Emerald Mountain] as Best Arabic Novel. Her writing has appeared, among other places, in The New York Times, A Public Space, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Granta. She is the managing editor of the cultural weekly Akhbar Al-Adab and, since 2003, its book review editor.
Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. She has been a contributor to many prominent publications including the Paris Review, Freeman’s, Washington Post, and The Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Tales of Two Planets (Penguin 2020), and Best American Essays 2022 (Harper Collins 2022). She is Senior Editor at The Markaz Review.