Starting tomorrow, Thursday May 13, 2011, Khaled Khalifa is on a tour in Europe for the launch of his book ‘In praise of hatred’, coming out in three languages at the same time.

Between 2008 and 2009, the book’s rights had been sold in six languages. Two years later, the book is finally out in three of them: French (Sindbad, Actes Sud), Italian (Bompiani) and Dutch (De Geus), while we still eagerly wait for the English (Transworld, Random House), Spanish (Lumen, Random House) and Norwegian (Minuskel) versions to come out.

Wandering what the reception the press and the readers will reserve to this dense and intense story, we can only be struck by the coincidence of the book’s publication in the West and the current events in Syria.
In praise of hatred is the story of the Syrian regime’s repression of the Muslim brotherhood in 1982, told through the eyes of a religious and activist young woman. The protests started last March are the first time the Syrian people dare defy the regime so massively in thirty years.

It was the final day of the fourth Palestine Festival of Literature and I knew it was going to be a long day.

I’m a student volunteer at the festival, and the closing event was to take place in the Silwan Solidarity Tent – a public meeting point in a deeply threatened neighbourhood of my city, Jerusalem – with more than twenty writers from all over the world.

A local start-up is turning Arabic books into audio editions, seeking to create the Arab world’s first digital audio library.

Established only three months ago, Masmoo3 has already secured business deals with several local value-added service companies which will introduce its audio content locally and in the region through mobile operators and related websites.

Over the last decade, a new generation of Arabic novelists has been moving beyond the social realism of their predecessors to reach out to the world.

University of Washington honors the memory of a former student, Hussein Al Barghouti on Monday, May 2, at 4:00.

Diwan Dar Abdellatif welcomes Jabbour Douaihy in Algiers on May 7th.