Advanced Arabic Literary Reader: For Students of Modern Standard Arabic by Jonas M. Elbousty and Muhammad Ali Aziz (review)

Described as a collection of literary extracts from across the Arab world that take into consideration each country and gender as well as prominent and emerging voices, the Advanced Arabic Literary Reader is written entirely in Modern Standard Arabic. It is meant to be suitable for both classroom and independent study environments, serving as an introduction to the rich world of modern Arabic literature. The stated objective in the preface is to develop the skills necessary for reading comprehension of authentic literary texts from the Arab world.

The Reader consists of sixty excerpts from novels and short stories. There are nineteen countries represented in all; the editors confess to omitting Somalia and Comoros because of the “scarcity of Arabic literary narratives.” The sheer geographical diversity of the chosen texts must be applauded. There are the conventional nations whose narratives are embedded in the mainstream consciousness: Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Syria. Then there are unsung modern works from less-celebrated countries in today’s literary arena: Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Libya, and Mauritania. Given that most, if not all, current literary readers on the market primarily focus on literature from the first list of countries, this carefully curated compendium of texts from underrepresented countries is crucial in aiding students to understand the true diversity of the Arab world.

The Reader is wanting, however, once the equality of genders is considered—a mere eleven of the sixty texts are penned by women. Undeniably, an effort has been made to include female authors, with iconic figures such as Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Nawal El Saadawi, and Hanan al-Shaykh featured. But one is left wondering where the other female luminaries of Arabic literature, such as Sahar Khalifa (Palestine), Alia Mamdouh (Iraq), Hoda Barakat (Lebanon), and Radwa Ashour (Egypt), are; these are novelists who are found in the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature and who by no means are new to the literary scene. Such emerging female voices as Maha Hassan (Syria) and Reneé Hayek (Lebanon)—thrice-longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction—and bestselling writer Bouthāyna Al-Īssa (Kuwait) also fail to make it into the collection. There is no shortage of female literary greats as well as more recently established writers to choose from. As such, the Reader has failed somewhat in providing an accurate representation of the modern Arabic literary tradition, which is an aspect that the editors should consider addressing in future editions.

The structure of each chapter is as follows: (a) biography of the author, (b) pre-reading activity, (c) summary of the excerpted novel or short story as a whole, (d) excerpt, (e) comprehension exercise, (f) sentence-matching exercise, (g) fill-in-the-blanks exercise, (h) true/false statement exercise, (i) discussion prompts, (j) translation section, and (k) writing prompts.

The texts are not organized in any sort of chronological or alphabetical order. Before delving into the exercises and how they combine to provide excellent scaffolding for the student in further understanding the text at hand, I must draw attention to the availability of audio recordings for each of the sixty texts. The audio files are generously free on the Routledge website, and those educators wanting to ensure that the grammatical aspects of the language are not forgotten in the flurry of content interpretation will be happy to know that the texts are read aloud with i‘rāb. These can be used as a review to get students to vowel a few lines before listening to the audio.

Each chapter provides the most comprehensive approach to a literary text that I have come across for Arabic language learners, encouraging them to engage with the text on a range of levels, using different skills in the process. The biography section is limited to an author’s origin, education, and key works. The prereading section is made up...