French Magazine “Lui” offers a brief review of Alwan’s Beavers, February
A rich Saudi man, overwhelmed by his family of morons and disenchanted mistress, leaves for America, the best place to host his melancholy. On a riverbed in Oregon, he meets a beaver, and seeks to find his way between contemplation, alcohol and personal development meetings. A rare and brilliant take on the midlife crisis – Arab style.
French original below
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Un riche Saoudien accablé par sa famille de débiles et sa maîtresse désabusée part pour l’Amérique, pays plus propre à accueillir son …

Below is an excerpt, read the whole interview here.
(…)
Youssefl Rakha: I go on about this so as to put you in the picture: the nineties, when I started showing my writing to people—that’s when the clash between younger prose poets and older guardians of the poetic ancien régime took place. This is partly of course what The Crocodiles is about. So, when I started writing, I found myself writing prose poems though I thought I wanted to write short stories.

Mohamad Hasan Alwan’s novel “Beavers” (Al Qondos, Dar al saqi) was recently published in France by le Seuil.

For the third time, the Lebanese novelist Jabbour Douaihy is on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This time, it’s for his novel “American Neighborhood”, published at Dar al Saqi. Another of Dar al Saqi’s titles is long-listed: The Daughter of Suslov, bu Yemeni novelist Habib Abdulrab Sarori.
 
 
 

“Rakha’s brilliant novel”

Reviewlab, by Skyler Vanderhoof.
December 2014
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The Crocodiles by prolific Egyptian novelist, reporter, poet, and photographer Youssef Rakha, is, at the very least, ambitious.. Ostensibly this book is about the eponymous Crocodiles, an underground group of guerilla poets formed in Egypt in the 1990’s and active until the early 2000’s. Like Irving Welsh’s Trainspotting, or Ernest Hemmingway’s The Sun also Rises, this book isn’t really aboutthe surface material. This is a book about people, about human conditions and relationships.