ArabLit Quarterly Summer 2020: CRIME (PDF)

Our summer 2020 issue of ARABLIT QUARTERLY features crime stories, crime puzzles, crime poems, and meditations on the nature of crime.

We start off with al-Tanukhi, and what is surely the most wonderfully weird crime story from the whole of the tenth century, translated here by Melanie Magidow, and a song of the Banu Sassan, translated by Brad Fox. From the early thirteenth century, we have a phrasebook of criminal terminology from across the region, from al-Jawbari's "Book of Charlatans," translated here by Humphrey Davies, and from Egypt's Golden Age of Crime Writing -- the mid-twentieth century -- we have a crime puzzle for you to solve, as well as two noir shorts, translated by Doaa Hafez.

We also have contemporary crime -- meditations on the genre by Nael Eltoukhy, short stories from Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan, and an "Evidence Room" curated by Nadia Ghanem: weapons used in Maghrebi crime fiction.

Note that in the final recipe -- reputed to have been used to poison a poet for his satirical verse -- the poison should not be included.

More than 100 pages of crime fiction, puzzles, poetry, and meditations on crime, criminality, and redemption to bring pleasure to your summer months.