Libraries are at the heart of the community and they have the potential to bring people together while also offering individuals life-changing opportunities. One important way that libraries can encourage immigrant and refugee families to visit is to stock a range of picture books for younger readers in bilingual and monolingual editions in a … Continue reading THE JASMINE SNEEZE
Reading A Woman in the Crossfire in the Fall of 2012 was not easy; the pain and suffering, both personal and collective, recorded by Samar Yazbek during the first one hundred days of Syria’s uprising against the regime continues unabated, and shamelessly without any effective international effort to relieve the suffering of civilians coming … Continue reading A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution
Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in all places, in all times. – Rives Collins, American author and Northwestern University professor. Thus through the ages from Homer to Chaucer to Scheherazade to Shakespeare to Dickens, and to all the modern day tale tellers, and … Continue reading Damascus Nights
Syria Speaks is a collection of “art and culture from the frontline” of the Syrian revolution published simultaneously in English and Arabic at a time when the revolution had been underway for three years and been transformed into an armed conflict in which millions of Syrians had been displaced both internally and externally, and in … Continue reading Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline
I was back visiting one of my favorite countries, Lebanon, when I purchased The Silence and the Roar in a chic mall in Beirut in 2013. My friend was downstairs purchasing a pair of Valentino boots and I was browsing the newly translated offerings in English from Arabic when I came across Nihad Sirees’ … Continue reading The Silence and the Roar
Lament for Syria by Amineh Abou Kerech Syrian doves croon above my head their call cries in my eyes. I’m trying to design a country that will go with my poetry and not get in the way when I’m thinking, where soldiers don’t walk over my face. I’m trying to design a country which … Continue reading “Lament for Syria”
Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future, a widely acclaimed graphic novel published first in French and then in translation in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and several other languages, is a work of extraordinary candour. Sattouf, who has a Syrian father and a French mother, shows minimal restraint when he portrays in pictures and … Continue reading The Arab of the Future
Excerpt from Aperture by Jacek Dehnel, translated by Karen Kovacik, forthcoming from Zephyr Press in June 2018 (ISBN: 978-1938890949): Matzevot Jewish Cemetery, Kraków Here letter and stone find fulfillment: a snail inlays ornamental tracing with silver thread. And the apple tree’s soft shadow falls over shattered slabs. Here grass and epoch find fulfillment. The hands … Continue reading Excerpt: Aperture by Jacek Dehnel
All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues, lit. 'In the West Nothing New') is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these … Continue reading International Banned Book: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
If someone mentions Polish speculative fiction in translation (SFT), you might immediately think about the prolific and much-translated Stanislaw Lem, or perhaps the fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski, whose Witcher series started off as a single short story and expanded into a wildly-popular series and then a comic, a film, and a video game. And yet, … Continue reading Polish Speculative Fiction in Translation
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 