Seamlessly balancing juxtapositions is Shibli’s great gift. We Are All Equally Far From Love is hypnotically visceral in its accrual of mundane details—the color of the sky, the fluttering of flags in the breeze, the endless routines of cooking, eating, breathing, sleeping, sweating—and grippingly cerebral in its meditations on despair, the emotional dimensions of which are shifted, echoed and mirrored through each section. In the hands of a lesser writer, the discontinuous structure, where we spend only a short time immersed in an individual’s internal world before another voice takes over, might lead to a disjointed, unengaging reading experience. But the discipline of Shibli’s aesthetic vision and her tight thematic focus produces, against the odds, a work of stunning coherence that feels cinematic, as though colored by Jim Jarmusch or Wong Kar-wai.

On April 24, at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, at 7 pm, Shibli will participate in the “Gazan Writers’ Salon—Fractured Web: Gazan Writing Online”:

ArteEast presents Fractured Web: Gazan Writing Online, a public program at Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, in which Palestinian writers will discuss how their work has been shaped and affected by the internet. In this discussion Somaya al Sousi and Fatena al Ghorra contextualize their work within the broader landscape of Palestinian literature online, while Adania Shibli (co-editor, Narrating Gaza) explores the way in which such platforms foster literary community and discourse.

The discussion will be moderated by Khalid Hadeed (Cornell University) and featuring academic discussant Helga Tawil Souri (NYU).

On April 25, at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Shibli will be part of a salon discussing “From Memoir to Reportage and Back Again”

ArteEast will present From Memoir to Reportage and Back Again: Gazan Writers Salon, to present contemporary writing from Gaza to New York’s literary audiences. Through readings of both poetry and prose, the writers will offer a rare glimpse into the diverse emerging and established voices that make up the dynamic literary scene in this city.

In his ode to Gaza, Mahmoud Darwish links Gazan literary production with its unique history within Palestine as a land that has been repeatedly occupied by external forces and subjected to over two decades of sanctions, blockade and strikes: “We are unfair to her when we search for her poems. Let us not disfigure the beauty of Gaza. The most beautiful thing in her is that she is free of poetry at a time when the rest of us tried to gain victory with poems…”

Like Darwish’s poem “Silence for Gaza,” we see Palestinian writers of subsequent generations grapple with the personal and communal experiences of Gaza’s history of occupation, blockade and war.

Participants include Fatena al Ghorra, author of five books of poetry including The Sea is Still Behind Us (Gaza, 2002) and A Very Disturbing Woman (Egypt, 2003), Ellay (multiple editions), Betrayals of god…Multi Scenarios (multiple editions); Adania Shibli, co-editor of the online forum Narrating Gaza, will read from multi-genre writings from Narrating Gaza of other writers that explore the repercussions of the Gaza War; Soumaya Al Sousi has produced four poetry collections, including The First Sip of the Sea’s Chest (1998), Doors (2003), Lonely Alone (2005), and Idea, Void, White in a joint collection with the poet Hala El Sharouf (published by Dar Al-Adab, Beirut, 2005).

These should be two outstanding events—if you’re in in NYC, please do come by.

12th ANNUAL JUNIPER LITERARY FESTIVAL
NEW WRITERS/NEW WRITING
April 13 & 14, 2012
Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst

On April 13 & 14, 2012 the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers will host the 12th annual Juniper Literary Festival: New Writers/New Writing. Focusing on the ever-changing landscape of new American poetry and fiction, the festival showcases emerging poets and fiction writers alongside dozens of independent journals and presses in a unique national event. Featuring readings by diverse and talented poets and writers, roundtables on crucial creative and professional issues, and a press fair, the festival introduces audiences to vital contemporary writing and explores issues essential to the future of American literature.

Schedule of Events

Friday, April 13
6:30 pm JOURNAL & BOOK FAIR opening reception

7:30 pm READING with Robert Fernandez, Amelia Gray, Anna Moschovakis, & Vincent Standley

Saturday, April 14
11:30 am JOURNAL & BOOK FAIR continues

12:00 pm READING with Christopher DeWeese, Corwin Ericson, Julia Holmes, & Paul Legault

1:15 pm ROUNDTABLES
Nuts & Bolts: From Manuscript to Book
moderated by Zach Savich

Digital Hybrids: How New Media Shape New Writing
moderated by Blake Butler

2:30 pm ROUNDTABLES
Editors’ Reading featuring bateau, Conjunctions, jubilat, & Noö Journal

Book/Art: The Book As Collaborative Form
moderated by Guy Pettit

3:45 pm READING with Blake Butler, Macgregor Card, Julia Cohen, & Anna Joy Springer

7:00 pm JOURNAL & BOOK FAIR reopens

7:30 pm KEYNOTE READING with James Tate, celebrating the publication of Eternal Ones of the Dream: Later Selected Poems

All events take place at the UMASS FINE ARTS CENTER. Free and open to the public.

I was hired in 2009 to teach translation in Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program—something that had never been offered in the MFA curriculum. To encourage as many students as possible to register for the translation workshop, I decided that I would not require that they know a second language. Working from the premise that proficiency and flexibility in English were the most important requirements for students in this particular workshop—and that together we would find resources to assist their understanding the various source languages—the translation workshop has, over the last three years, produced some remarkable projects. These include:

• A translation/stage adaptation of The Tale of Genji  set in a postapocalyptic Japan
• A hybrid form that I am still searching for a way to name that consists of a translation of a Strindberg short story woven together with a lyric essay about the translator’s process
• Translations of Hawaiian petroglyphs
• A plan for a scratch-and-sniff, pop-up book translation of the Song of Songs
• A graphic version of Don Quixote
• An adaptation of a feminist Senegalese novel as a series of blog entries written by an African-American woman from Alabama

On Friday, Sunetra will read at Booklink Booksellers in Thorne’s Market in Northampton at 7 pm.

Love to see you there!

Eight years ago, when the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli was still living in Ramallah and hadn’t yet moved to London, she told the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif that life under occupation, even with an Israeli passport, pushes a writer to retreat into “a kind of autism.

Reality now is too frightening, impossible to grasp,” she said. “You could say that fiction becomes a kind of perversion.” Everything about the occupation “affects my writing,” she explained. “I can’t work for very long. It’s as though concentration becomes claustrophobic. The situation controls you. It affects you like a fever.”

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that so many of the characters in Shibli’s fiction – particularly in her second novel, “We Are All Equally Far From Love,” translated by Paul Starkey and published this month by Clockroot Books – are so often fevered and perverse, driven not to deviancy but to bottomless and self-destructive hatred.

My new book, For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings, will be published in print in Hebrew in a couple of months. But at the beginning of January 2012 I decided to try something new, and published a free digital copy of it on… Facebook.

The idea of publishing an entire new collection of very short stories on Facebook was, in part, an experiment to see how literature can become more social.

Read the rest here. And in celebration/solidarity, Electric Literature is also publishing some newly translated Epstein stories on their own Facebook page.

(Want more? May we suggest Epstein’s Lunar Savings Time and Blue Has No South, both available in print and (in Google’s ebookstore) ebook form (if not yet on Facebook…)?)

I arrive at Lydd airport. At passport control, I present my passport through a small opening in the glass panel to the officer sitting behind it. We wait a little until first three security personnel arrive, then four others—two policemen and a policewoman, and an interrogator from the Israeli intelligence services accompanied by a young woman who remains with us during questioning, most likely for the same reason that male doctors summon a female nurse to remain in the room when a woman’s reproductive organs are examined. The intelligence services want to examine my private world, in an interview that will not take long, the interrogator assures me, if I “cooperate” with them. I have just arrived from Berlin. I stayed there approximately two months, participating in a project called the “West–Eastern Divan” that aims to foster dialogue between the East and the West. Why should the subject of East and West concern me? I let my thoughts flow like water over sand, spontaneously sneaking between the grains, so they may find an answer to the question.

…. In the end, I resort to science instead of nature. I recall what my nephew told me several years ago. In one of the medicine classes he was attending at university, the lecturer asked the students what they thought was the primary cause of lung cancer. Smoking, replied one of the students. The lecturer commented that that was the correct answer, then asked, what was the second most common cause of lung cancer? No one answered. “Smoking,” he responded. What was the third? Smoking. The fourth? Smoking. The fifth? Smoking. The sixth? Smoking. The seventh? Smoking. The eighth? Smoking. The ninth? Smoking. The top nine causes of lung cancer are smoking. It may be said that at least the top four causes of my participation in any activity whose subject is East–West dialogue are money. And if the amount were doubled, it could then be said that the top nine causes of my participation in activities of this kind are money.

But that’s just the beginning. Read the rest here!