Frankfurt Book Fair Preps

The CR continues its coverage of preparations for this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, where the Arab World is the guest of honor with a link to this Al Ahram article, where four young Egyptian writers talk about their work, their fears and their expectations. The writers are Iman Mersal, Ibrahim Farghali, Zahra Yousri and MG favorite Ahmed Al-Aidi, who says

One doesn’t go to the biggest book fair in the world to improve one’s image as an Arab. All this talk of Arabs being good people, really much better than they appear in the West, that they’re not all terrorists etc — it’s ridiculous. The reason we’re going is that we do have place on the cultural map, we have a literature that cannot be ignored.

. Al-Aidi is the author of To Be Abbas Al-Abd, and if you’re reading this and looking for a hot new author to add to your foreign literature list, you know whom to look for. By the way, despite the presence of writers like Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mohammed Berrada, Morocco will not be officially represented.