Author Description

In this issue, we have extraordinary multiple translations of Ibn Arabi by Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger, and two ways of translating Haytham al-Wardany’s Book of Sleep: into English text and a musical playlist.The short fictions range from emerging authors like Ameer Hamad to celebrated short-story writers such as Najwa Bin Shatwan and Tareq Emam to those who need no introduction, such as Naguib Mahfouz, whose "The Man in the Picture" appears in English, translated by Karim Zidan, for the first time.This issue’s “Judge a Book by Its Cover” column is generously and beautifully written by Hadeel Eltayeb, about a 1980 children’s book called The Evil Eye, apparently translated from an Irish folktale, illustrated by a Syrian, and published in Beirut, which she discovered in Qatar. Nawal Nasrallah writes a short food-history memoir about eating sheep’s eyeballs as a child, writing both about how they appear in classical texts as well as in current culinary practice. And we have the four stories shortlisted for the 2019 ArabLit Story Prize.In all: an eye's feast.