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The Library Is Open

A blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses. Every book gets a gay rating.

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Tag: Arabic writing

Review: Son Of Sin by Omar Sakr

A heady mix of mundane and heavenly, the sins of the flesh and the yearning of the spirit.

Arabic writing, Australian, Bisexual, Contemporary, Fiction, Islam, Lebanon, LGBTIQ, Middle East, Novel, queer, Sydney, Turkey

Review: The Other Half Of You by Michael Mohammad Ahmad

A bracing read about modern masculinity.

Arabic writing, Australian, Contemporary, Fiction, Novel

Review: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)

A short, seething and immaculate novel about what it’s like living in Israeli occupied Palestine.

Arabic writing, Fiction, Israel, Novel, Palestine, Translation

Review: The Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr

The Lost Arabs is a collection of cosmological, mystical poetry, a search for belonging and god in hell on earth.

Arabic writing, Australian, Colonialism, Middle East, Poetry

Review: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

Celestial Bodies achieves a kind of literary perfection.

Arabic writing, Man Booker International, Novel, Oman, Translation

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This huge history of the last 30,000 years of human existence sets out to demolish the myth of progress, that humans started out in simple tribes and ended up in complex Western civilisation.
The second of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels picks up immediately where the first left off, back at the wedding of the brilliant Lila Cerullo to grocer and neighbourhood businessman Stefano Carracci. What follows is a more sprawling but also more contained story, following Lila and narrator Lenu through Lila’s marriage and Lenu’s studies in their early twenties.
Ali Smith is done. At the beginning of this *cough* companion piece to her recent Seasonal Quartet, narrator and artist Sand is bummed out and in isolation, even bored with puns and wordplay (Ali Smith without puns and wordplay!?). It’s 2021 in the UK and lockdown is over but people are still dying by the hundreds.
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