Robyn Creswell

‘Endless Organic Growth’

The recent drawings of the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, now ninety-two, derive their energy from the tension between suffering and pleasure.

Then What Happened?

Yasmine Seale’s new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.

On the Road

The Book of Travels, Hanna Diyab’s memoir of his Mediterranean adventures, is a mixture of clear-eyed observation and wide-eyed innocence.

C.V.

The Body and the Border

Making and Unmaking

Lebanon’s Infernal Circle

The Slave Trade

a poem

A Free Man in Nablus

‘An Enthusiastick Sect’

Waking the Dead

Persia’s Hybrid Art

The longer one studies the artworks in the exhibition “Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran,” the more absorbing they become.

The Seal of the Poets

Syrian Fables

Again and again in Osama Alomar’s tales, a promised rescue or moment of respite turns out to be the trapdoor to a deeper circle of hell.

Tripoli Nights with a Master of Arabic

A Different Syria

The anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara shows the everyday as rendered strange by war, yet war itself takes place among the stubborn routines of daily life.

The First Great Arabic Novel

Syria’s Lost Spring

For an introduction to the ideas and culture of the original Syrian protesters one can scarcely do better than Syria Speaks, an anthology of visual and literary work, most of it from the early days of the uprising.

Escaping Beirut

In Rabih Alameddine’s new novel, An Unnecessary Woman, the narrator is a septuagenarian literary translator in Beirut who has “slipped into art to escape life.”

Chasing Beirut’s Ghosts

Rabee Jaber’s novel, The Mehlis Report, published in Arabic in 2005 and now expertly translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, takes place in the summer and fall following Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination. The novel evokes this unsettled period with frightening precision. It reads like a historical novel that happens to be about the very recent past.