Two award-winning Palestinian authors serving life sentences in Israeli prisons were released on October 13 as part of the exchange for Israeli captives held in Gaza.

In this “BETWEEN TWO ARABIC TRANSLATORS” conversation, Yasmeen Hanoosh and Mahmoud Hosny Roshdy discuss the idea of untranslatability (and perhaps, by extension, unreadability) and the work Salim Barakat, and why, if a translation were complete and perfect, this might mean that the work was born dead.

On Friday morning, the 23rd of May 2025, while Ala’ Al-Najjar, a Palestinian pediatrician at Al-Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in the Southern Gaza Strip, was treating the wounds of the injured children of the genocidal Israeli war, she received the news of martyrdom of her nine children: Yahia, Rakan, Raslan, Jubran, Eve, Revan, Sadeen, Luqman, and Sidra. Her eldest child was twelve years old, whereas her youngest was only a six-months old baby. Nine days later, her husband, Dr. Hamdi Al-Najjar, joined his children due to his serious wounds. Ala’ has only one child left alive. This poem is written for her.

"Press your body to the sea— / it comes out cool, unharmed— / and let tears move across your hidden grief."

This month, Maamoul Press publishes a new zine by young Gazan creators Jehad Abu Dayya and Esraa el-Banna: The Final Scene.

Everything was fine -- until she read that story. 

"Even writing, even a warm home—I am afraid of losing them at any moment, of becoming homeless again, of searching for a language that resembles me."

Thank you so much for preordering Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato by Anny Gaul. Note: submitting a patron request to your public or institutional library counts as a preo...

Amazon.com: Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (Volume 87) (California Studies in Food and Culture): 9780520409132: Gaul, Anny: Books

French publisher Fidel Anthelme X is planning to bring out a bilingual Arabic-French collection by Palestinian poet Dana Flaifl, Tout ce que j’ai c’est l’écriture, avec elle je résiste, translated to the French by Lotfi Nia. The publisher does not have funding for this book, and printing costs are just over €1,000. The book is scheduled for release in January 2026, and the publisher is now offering the book for sale at €10 + €3 shipping (in France), to raise the necessary funds for its publication.

Two searing poems about the cycle of war and suffering by Sudanese poet and journalist Essam Eisa Rajab.

As publication dates often slip — and new books surface — we try to have a glance at what’s really (to the best of our knowledge) coming in translation from Arabic at the start of each month. If you have more books to add, please let us know.