COLLECTION: After the Arab Spring - 5 Writers to Watch

[Ryan Goble]

The NYTimes has your Middle East summer reading list covered...

• In her debut novel, “Chronicle of a Last Summer,” Ms. Rashidi, an Egyptian journalist, explores the country’s political turmoil through the lens of a girl’s coming-of-age in Cairo.

• In his dark fantasy novel “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” the Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi takes the premise of Mary Shelley’s horror story and turns it into a haunting allegory for sectarian violence. A Baghdad street peddler named Hadi collects body parts from the carnage of bombings and sectarian attacks, and combines them to create a monster. The composite corpse comes to life and takes revenge on the people responsible for the deaths, slaying Shiites and Sunnis, criminals and government forces alike.

• Mr. Mabkhout’s debut novel, “The Italian,” unfolds in Tunisia during the tumultuous late 1980s and early 1990s, and examines the political clashes between leftists and Islamists and the forces that brought the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to power.

• Mr. Haddad’s debut novel, “Guapa,” published this spring by Other Press, takes place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country after a popular uprising fails to bring political freedom and stability. The narrative unfolds over a single day as Rasa, a young gay Arab man, searches for his best friend, an activist who has been arrested by the police.

• Mr. Khalifa’s novel “No Knives in the Kitchen of This City,” which will be published in English this fall, is set in Aleppo during the 1960s and 2000s, and follows one family that struggles under the brutality of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Full article HERE.