Rebecca Hussey

1 week ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Alex Tan |Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey

A chronicler of the chimeric, the Egyptian writer Mansoura Ez Eldin has been celebrated in the Arab world for her feverish, fanciful plots. To read her feels like opening one’s eyes into a fugue state, a landscape in which the parameters of reality seem just slightly off-kilter. The air, in her universe, is always abuzz with ethereal presences and diaphanous bodies, anticipating the propitious moment for revelation.

3 weeks ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey |Alina Stefanescu

From Schaffner Press | The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura by Tierno Monénembo, translated from the French by Ryan Chamberlain | Fiction | 240 pages | ISBN 9781639640591 | US$17.95 What the publisher says: “In this gripping novel set in both French Guinea and Paris, award-winning author (The King of Kahel) Tierno Monénembo explores themes of international exile, sexual abuse, generational trauma, and repressed memory of a people and country under the regime of dictator Sekou Toure from...

1 month ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey |Alina Stefanescu

Now in its third year, the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize celebrates a thrilling span of books, across genres, languages, countries of origin, and publishers. During the course of 2024, our panel—a combination of member critics and several board members—deliberated over hundreds of books, resulting in the following shortlist. It’s an honor to present our judges’ appreciations for our six finalists.

Oct 28, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Rebecca Hussey |Tobias Carroll |Suzumi Suzuki

Is beauty a gift? Is the body itself? Beauty could be understood as a quality passed down from parent to child and thereby given or “gifted,” even if only in a passive sense, through genetic happenstance. Beauty could also be a “gift” as in a talent, something that you inherently possess. In both cases, it is something that happens to you. You can work at being beautiful, but to be “gifted” with beauty is to be a recipient.

Sep 22, 2024 | full-stop.net | Rebecca Hussey

[Transit Books; 2024]Tr. from the Arabic by Robin MogerEgyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat did not publish in her lifetime, but she briefly became a public figure after her novel, Love and Silence, appeared in 1967, four years after her death by suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Thirty years later, Love and Silence had mostly disappeared from public consciousness when Iman Mersal found it in a Cairo book stall and bought it on a whim for a pound.