Escape Acts

Ursula and MLQ discuss a moving new book documenting the suffering and the resourcefulness of Yazidi women taken captive by Daesh, and the efforts to help them escape; and the perversely dull newspaper columns of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.

Show notes

• Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq is coming out in March 27, 2018 from US publisher New Directions and as The Beekeeper of Sinjar from the UK’s Serpent’s Tail in August 2018. Both were translated by Dunya Mikhail and Max Weiss. 
• Les Revenants: Ils étaient partis faire le jihad, ils sont de retour en France was written by David Thomson and won the Prix du livre Albert Londres in 2017.
• Historian Omar Mohammed is the force behind Mosul Eye, an independent writer who documented what was happening in Mosul during Daesh’s occupation. He wrote anonymously for three years before revealing his identity in December 2017 and can still be followed at @MosulEye and @omardemosul. One of Mosul’s libraries re-opened this month.
• Omar Mohammed was interviewed by Al Fanar’s Gilgamesh Nabeel.
• The Casablanca International Book Fair is going on now through Feburary 18, with Egypt as a guest of honor.
• The shockingly dull collection Essays of the Sadat Era: The Non-fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz: Volume II was recently released by The Gingko Library and is being distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press.