Adam Talib

Syllables and Scansion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This lesson introduces the fundamental building blocks of Classical Arabic prosody: syllable types and how to scan Arabic verse. Understanding these patterns is essential for reading and appreciating pre-modern Arabic poetry.

Welcome to Research Notes

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This section of my website is a space for depositing research materials that don’t fit within the constraints of formal academic publication. Here you’ll find:

Working notes on primary sources and ongoing projects
Supplementary materials — appendices, concordances, and additional data related to published articles and books
Blog posts on topics of scholarly interest
Images and PDFs — manuscript reproductions, charts, and other visual materials
Responses to other scholars’ work and methodological reflections

Unlock "Empty Cages": A Virtual Book Discussion

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Empty Cages

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Empty Cages is Fatma Qandil’s first novel and her first book available in English. The English translation was published by Hoopoe on May 27, 2025; the paperback edition is 260 pages.

The novel follows a woman looking back across childhood, family life, illness, violence, care, and loss in Cairo. Its power comes from the way private memory, domestic detail, and the long pressures of Egyptian social change gather into a searching account of survival and selfhood.

Manchester in Translation 2024: Working with a Writer Panel

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Unlearning the Aesthetics of Malicious Joy

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Podcast: How Modern Scholars Influenced the Perception of Classical Arabic Literature

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As Inconvenient and Offensive as Abundance

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Book Reviews & Encyclopedia Entries

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Book Reviews

Review of Lara Harb, Arabic Poetics: aesthetic experience in classical Arabic literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). International Journal of Middle East Studies, in press.
Review of Ibn Qutaybah, The Excellence of the Arabs, eds. James E. Montgomery and Peter Webb, trans. Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb (NYU Press, 2017). Speculum 97:1 (January 2022), pp. 199–200.
Review of Bilal Orfali, The Anthologist’s Art: Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī and his Yatīmat al-dahr (Brill, 2016), Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 139, no. 1, 2019, pp. 251–53.

Translating for Bigots

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Qasida Poetry: A World unto Itself

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

al-Safadī, His Critics, and the Drag of Philological Time

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

citystruck

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

How Do You Say "Epigram" in Arabic?: Literary History at the Limits of Comparison

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This monograph presents the first history of the Arabic epigram form (مقطوع). This form was extremely popular in the later half of pre-modern Arabic literary history (c. 1200–1900) and remains largely unknown in contemporary scholarship. It ranks among the most accessible and immediate literary forms in Arabic and appeared ubiquitously in all manner of literary texts from the period. The epigrams treat amatory and erotic themes, descriptions of natural and luxury objects, jokes, and riddles. The monograph presents the first sustained scholarly engagement with this genre while examining the category of epigram in world literature and its application across literary traditions including Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Turkish. The study offers a new history of classical Arabic literature while addressing important theoretical and critical issues in comparative literature.

Emblematic or Exceptional? aṣ-Ṣafadī and ad-Damāmīnī

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Fathers and Husbands

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Arabic Literature, 1200–1800: A New Orientation

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Monica Balda-Tillier and Adam Talib.

Special Issue of Annales Islamologiques (Volume 49, Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2016).

The issue gathers studies that revisit Arabic literary production between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period too often treated as marginal in older literary histories. Its introduction and six dossier articles describe renewed attention to post-classical Arabic writing through case studies of lesser-known authors, embedded poems, love treatises, shadow theatre, robbers, hashish, and other subjects that reveal the period’s creative vitality.

The Doves' Necklace

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Co-translated with Katharine Halls.

Winner of the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation (tied for 1st place, Arabic-to-English category).

Set in Mecca, Raja Alem’s novel begins with a woman’s body found in Abu al-Rus, the Lane of Many Heads. The investigation opens onto a many-voiced portrait of the holy city, blending mystery, social critique, surreal narration, and the lane’s own memory of lives shaped by desire, secrecy, migration, and power.

Reviews

“Alem, the first woman to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, blends surrealism and mystery in this challenging novel, which opens with the Lane of Many Heads taking on narrative duty” — Publishers Weekly (Andrew Nurnberg Associates)

A New Source For The Poetry Of Ibn Matrūh (1196–1251)

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Al-Mutanabbi in His Own Words

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Caricature and Obscenity in Mujūn Poetry and African-American Women's Hip Hop

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Rude, the Bad, and the Bawdy: Essays in Honour of Geert Jan van Gelder

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Adam Talib, Marlé Hammond, and Arie Schippers.

This volume collects eighteen essays on all facets of obscenity in classical and modern Arabic literature to celebrate the career of Geert Jan van Gelder, FBA, Laudian Professor of Arabic. Contributors examine how indecency, profanity, taboo, wit, parody, and erotic expression have been signalled, evaluated, translated, and preserved across Arabic literary history.

My contribution is entitled “Caricature and obscenity in mujūn poetry and African-American women’s hip-hop,” comparing modes of caricatured obscenity across both genres to demonstrate their parodic and camp orientation.

Woven Together as Though Randomly Strung: Variation in Collections of Naevi Poetry

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

AUC MESC Lecture

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Many Lives of Arabic Verse: Ibn Nubātah al-Misrī Mourns More Than Once

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Topoi and Topography in the Histories of al-Hīra

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Review of volume

Translation Slam: One Text, Two Translators, Many Possibilities

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Pseudo-Ṯaʿālibī's Book of Youths

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Sarmada

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Fadi Azzam’s Sarmada tells the layered stories of a village in southern Syria, where memory, legend, desire, violence, and political dread move through generations. The novel draws on magical realism and Arabic storytelling traditions to portray a place haunted by its past and by the pressures of dictatorship and exile.

Reviews

“[…] the gem of the Arabic literature of dissent.” — The New Yorker (Full review)

“Brimful of magic, Sarmada is a book to be swallowed in rapturous gulps. It’s beautifully written and, save the rare plunge into cliché, beautifully translated by Adam Talib.” — The Independent (Interlink)

The Hashish Waiter

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Khairy Shalaby’s novel centers on Rowdy Salih, the attendant who keeps the pipes filled in Hakeem’s hash den, a hidden meeting place for Cairo intellectuals, artists, writers, and drifters. Through the den and its regulars, the novel follows comic and tragic lives from the aftermath of 1967 through the shocks of the 1970s, building a portrait of street culture, political disillusionment, and unruly survival.

Reviews

“Twelve years on from the first publication of The Hashish Waiter in Arabic, its hero Rowdy Salih can be seen as a precursor of the millions of Egyptians who finally rose up and said ‘Enough’ and ‘No’ in the 2011 revolution.” — Banipal Magazine (Full review)

Cairo Swan Song

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Cairo Swan Song, shortlisted for the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008, follows Mustafa, a disillusioned former student radical making a documentary about Cairo’s street children with his American girlfriend. The novel moves through downtown Cairo’s artists, intellectuals, activists, opportunists, and outsiders, tracing a city where private desire, political defeat, and social abandonment have become almost impossible to separate.

Reviews

“[…] given the city’s political and social climate, that may be about right. Either way, it seems hard to argue with the air of desperation and resignation Said’s characters and prose evoke.” — The Independent (AUC Press)

Le Gallienne's Paraphrase and the Limits of Translation

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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