
Chip Rossetti
223 posts

Chip Rossetti
@Chip_Rossetti
Arabic literature and translation, book publishing, languages (dead and living). Editorial Director, Library of Arabic Literature. Ph.D., Univ. of Pennsylvania.


NEW FROM BANIPAL BOOKS In her novel Omani author Huda Hamed confronts the challenges that people, particularly women, face as Muscat's modernisation replaces old ways of living in this enchanting and modern take on the Cinderella tale. A group of women friends become jinn themselves in the guise of Cinderellas During the modernisation of Muscat, its people’s spirits seemed to harden and dry up, and one day the female jinn just disappeared. Where did they go to? Have they died, are they in hiding after losing out to electricity and cement, to air conditioners and televisions? Has life lost its playfulness and joy without the transformational powers of the jinn? Are life’s sweet moments of pleasure and delight no more, now the people are weighed down with daily chores, boring work, and all the routines apparently necessary for modern life? It seemed so, until Zubayda and seven friends, all mothers and wives overburdened with one thing after another, decide they have to somehow recover the powers of the lost female jinn. Zubayda collects together their vivid stories, revealing secrets until then suppressed, as on one special night every month they transform into Cinderellas and meet together in Chef Ramon’s restaurant on Muscat’s beach front. In her novel Omani author Huda Hamed confronts the challenges that people, particularly women, face as Muscat's modernisation replaces old ways of living in this enchanting and modern take on the Cinderella tale. A group of women friends become jinn themselves in the guise of Cinderellas. Their individual stories reveal their innermost thoughts, thoughts they don't and can't share with their husbands and other family members or even neighbours. The stories of the Cinderellas unwittingly show the existence of two worlds, the public one with all its social restrictions, societal taboos, which they live with daily, and their own secret, untellable one in which they can break free and speak aloud their true opinions and feelings when they become the jinn Cinderellas. banipal.co.uk/banipal_books/…


It's our pleasure today to shout out ALTA47 conference sponsor @LibraryArabLit! Your generous support of our upcoming conference (ALTA47: Voices in Translation, held October 25-28 in Milwaukee, WI) is so appreciated. Thank you for helping make it possible! bit.ly/3AYu2vt














Forthcoming Feb 2024: 'Girl Detective Meets 1001 Nights,' '15 Poets,' a New Syrian Novel, and Genocide Memoir arablit.org/2024/02/01/for…



