Summer Reading!

JORDAN ELGRABLY • Publisher/Editor-at-Large

Although Ahmet Altan doesn’t often make it to international top 10 lists as a Turkish writer, I found myself mesmerized by one of three books he wrote in prison, the novel Madame Hayat, or as it’s known in English and Italian, Lady Life (Other Press, 2023, translated by Yasemin Çongar). I found this unpredictable love triangle hard to put down. The narrative features Fazıl and Sıla— two college students whose families both lost their small fortunes, who are equally immersed in the world of literature and ideas—and Hayat Hanım, a dancer whose mature beauty and street-savvy wisdom entrances her young lover. The action takes place in an unnamed country where authoritarianism and fascist thugs make life dangerous and unpredictable. The prose and the storytelling make Lady Life a narrative I won’t soon forget.

My next book this summer is a novel recommended to me by a Syrian Armenian friend, who claimed it was a reading experience she couldn’t forget. Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue (Levine Querido, 2020) is an Iran-to-America coming of age story, one that has garnered many indie awards and accolades. You have to admit that the opening line is intriguing: “All Persians are liars and lying is a sin.” This is actually a young adult tale that has won the hearts of more mature readers. Besides, I am always interested in writers who grow up in one mother tongue but then write successfully in another. We can add Nayeri to this list, along with Rabih Alameddine, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, Jerzy Kosinski, Milan Kundera, and Laila Lalami.

LINA MOUNZER • Editor-in-Chief 

I’m late to the game but I’m finally reading Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat in its English translation by Robin Moger. I love Mersal’s writing—her How To Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts is one of those books I can just pick up and open to any page and start reading. Traces of Enayat has the same sensibility I loved so much in her other book. This, too, is a hybrid kind of memoir that picks a mystery—in this case, the life and death of Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat—and works an investigation through interviews, anecdotes, places, archives, and Mersal’s own memories and experiences to create a work that unfolds across a vast expanse that is at once thoroughly impressive in its philosophical breadth while still managing to feel totally intimate.

Next, or rather, simultaneously, I’m also reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem for a personal project I’m working on. I have to keep stopping to rage and breathe and reflect: of all the things Arendt saw clearly, perhaps what she was most prescient about is how an insistence on exceptionalizing antisemitism as an inherent, almost primeval force would play out into the nightmarish Jewish supremacism we see before us now, though I gather even she would have been shocked by some of the extremes of its malevolence.

LARA VERGNAUD • Managing Editor

Foundry Editions is a recent and exciting discovery for me. I’ve been eagerly awaiting their forthcoming publication of Karim Kattan’s Eden at Dawn, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman. I’m well acquainted with the original, which is one of the most virtuosic novels I’ve read in years—a haunting tale of queer love set in Palestine, with masterful strokes such as making the sun the omnipotent (though unreliable) narrator. Zuckerman is an immensely talented translator, so I’m fully confident the English novel will be as riveting as the French. (also coming out with Restless Books in the U.S.)

I’ve been on a memoir kick for a while and have been saving Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me for my summer vacation. Granted, not your typical beach read, but I’ve been enamored with Roy’s writing since my teenage reading of The God of Small Things, which (in my case) is one of those seminal books that completely destabilizes you and reshapes what you think writing can be and do. Mother Mary Comes to Me explores Roy’s relationship with her late mother, and how she came to be a writer. I read one review that noted the memoir can be “self-dramatizing,” which only makes me want to read it more.

Honorable mentions: I’ve also packed two more books for my summer getaway: Huna by our Literary Editor Abdelrahman ElGendy; and Floodlines by our Fiction Editor Saleem Haddad. I’ve already begun reading the former, which is more moving and elegant than I can convey in a line or two. The latter (in paperback form) has been steadily moving through the editorial staff, from Beirut to Montpellier to Tunis. Based on the response from my fellow editors, I will not be disappointed!

SALEEM HADDAD • Fiction Editor

I started reading I Can Imagine It For Us, a slim but extraordinary memoir by Mai Serhan one evening and couldn’t put it down. It is tragic, funny, caustic, and deeply loving all at once. In short, luminous fragments, Serhan paints a complex portrait of her late father, a Palestinian refugee, while tracing how a single act of displacement reverberates not just through one life but across generations. The memoir moves between Cairo, Beirut, the UAE, China, and Palestine with remarkable ease. It is a masterclass in memoir: brave and brutally honest, yet full of tenderness and complicated love. One of the finest memoirs on Palestine I’ve read in recent years.

Earlier this summer I discovered Foundry Editions through one of my favorite London bookshops, Veranda Books. The press specializes in Mediterranean literature and also publishes English translations of the wonderful Palestinian writer Karim Kattan. I’m slowly making my way through their catalogue and haven’t been disappointed yet. While I’m in Greece, I’m planning to read Deepfake by Makis Malafekas, a gritty, philosophical literary noir set against the backdrop of post-crash Athens.

ABDELRAHMAN ELGENDY • Literary Editor 

Excited to dig into this forthcoming memoir by Azra Liaqat Khan, Mona, which I think impressively subverts the repressed Muslim girl trope by dissecting how the same American logic of extraction operates across spaces, from the strip club to the college classroom.

Next, I can’t wait to start Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17 (reviewed in TMR here), a novel based on the life of her late father, a Palestinian refugee displaced during the Nakba, which I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about.

RANA ASFOUR • Executive Editor

Most of the year, I’m knee-deep in fiction, wading through mountains of novels to choose the perfect TMR Book Club picks. But, come summer, I make it a point to tuck into non-fiction titles. Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide by Eyal Weizman (reviewed in TMR here) has been lurking in my Kindle since its release in May. I was reminded of it last week at the Amman International Film Festival, when British actor and activist Khalid Abdalla had nothing but glowing words about it.

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I’m just finishing up Tareq Baconi’s memoir Fire in Every Direction, which had me clinging on to every word. And now I’ve got my hands on his forthcoming release, What Now: On Palestine, Freedom and Our Global Future, in which he argues that a liberated Palestine could heal the wounds of WWII by challenging and upturning colonialism, racism, and imperialism that continue to shadow our world today.

Of course, no summer of mine is complete without a pulse-pounding real crime thriller that reads like fiction. Enter London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe. It investigates the true story of British teenager Zac Brettler, who plunged into the Thames in 2019 from a fifth-story building, leaving behind a maze of secrets and a double life as Zac Ismailov.