Zain Khalid
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Zain Khalid
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
Everything We Need
Zain Khalid
Since Elias Khoury, the celebrated Lebanese novelist and critic, died in September, I have been thinking about a passage from his 1998 epic of Palestinian displacement, Gate of the Sun. “You should have eaten the oranges,” Khoury’s narrator is told by a former freedom fighter. “The homeland is something we have to consume,” the freedom fighter continues. “We have to devour the oranges of Palestine, and we have to devour...
After the Fatwa | Losing Faith in Salman Rushdie
Zain Khalid
Following the vicious attack on Salman Rushdie last August in Chautauqua, New York, following the news that the writer had been stabbed at least ten times and lost the use of a hand and sight in one eye, following the requisite denunciations of his assailant, there began a hagiography. In The Atlantic, Bernard-Henri Lévy lauded “The Immortal Salman Rushdie.” The New Yorker’s David Remnick argued that Rushdie should win the...
