Recommendations from our site
“Hanan al-Shaykh has written several novels and several short story collections. She’s well established. And she broke a lot of taboos. She was the first Arab woman writer that I read in my teens, translated from Arabic…This collection is set between Beirut, Africa, Cairo. In the story I included in We Wrote In Symbols, a woman tries to excite her husband by making him watch Japanese erotic films, after being encouraged by her friend who is much wilder than she is. Another one of the stories is a love story about a woman whose husband left her for another woman just before he died. During a memorial to the woman’s mother, all these crazy theatrical friends of her mother pile into her flat and start trying to raise the dead with an ouiji board, and she manages, kind of negligently, to contact her dead husband, and she asks him: did you love me?” Read more...
Selma Dabbagh, Novelist
