Books by Ameen Rihani
“The novel’s set-up is a classic modernist trick. The unnamed narrator of the book comes across a manuscript in a library in Cairo, written by someone called Khalid, telling his life story. The narrator, using some other sources, weaves this into a fuller narrative telling the story of Khalid traveling to America in the early 20th century…The whole book is written in the most unusual way – it’s unlike anything I have ever read before. It’s a proto-modernist story of movement and Arab displacement and the attempt to reconcile East with West. It is also, at times, quite difficult to read. Sometimes, you feel you could be reading some lost masterpiece by James Joyce; at others, it feels like an overly literal translation of a classical Arabic poem; at others, it is more like a religious treatise written by a madman.” Read more...
The Best 20th-Century Arab Novels
Raphael Cormack, Literary Scholar
Interviews where books by Ameen Rihani were recommended
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1
The Book of Khalid
by Ameen Rihani -
2
The Open Door
by Latifa al-Zayyat & Marilyn Booth (translator) -
3
Season of Migration to the North
by Tayeb Salih and Denys Johnson-Davies (translator) -
4
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
by Emile Habiby & Trevor LeGassick and Salma Khadra Jayyusi (translators) -
5
Wild Thorns
by Sahar Khalifeh & Trevor Le Gassick and Elizabeth Fernea (translators)
The Best 20th-Century Arab Novels, recommended by Raphael Cormack
The Best 20th-Century Arab Novels, recommended by Raphael Cormack
Whether it’s a tragic novel set in post-indepedence Sudan or picaresque stories about a Palestinian living in Israel after 1948, many of the key Arab novels of the 20th century are available in English. Raphael Cormack, a professor of Arabic studies at Durham University, talks us through five novels from a variety of countries that explore different themes and trends in the evolution of the novel in the Arabic-speaking world.
