{"id":258936,"date":"2007-12-28T18:34:49","date_gmt":"2007-12-28T18:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2007\/12\/28\/first-great-saudi-novel\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:34:45","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:34:45","slug":"first-great-saudi-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2007\/12\/28\/first-great-saudi-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"First Great Saudi Novel?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Included on our list of best translations of 2007, <i>Wolves of the Crescent Moon<\/i> by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed got a nice review in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nysun.com\/article\/68553\"><i>NY Sun<\/i><\/a> this. In fact, Ben Lytal goes so far as to point to this as the &#8220;First Great Saudi Novel&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Those Saudi novels that do get published \u2014 even those that must be published abroad \u2014 do not always serve the cause of literature. There is a thriving interest in the women of Saudi Arabia \u2014 because they suffer a rare degree of isolation under Sharia law, but also because there is something exotic about that isolation. Saudi critics have accused novels such as &#8220;The Girls of Riyadh&#8221; and memoirs such as &#8220;Single in Saudi&#8221; of pandering to a salacious Western audience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Mr. Al-Mohaimeed, a sincere writer who claims Balzac and Dickens along with Dostoevsky as influences, wants to distinguish himself from those exoticizing Saudi writers who &#8220;are writing with the aim only of exciting the reader.&#8221; Serious writers worldwide would like to politic on behalf of &#8220;quality lit,&#8221; but only a few have a legitimate campaign. The &#8220;Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction,&#8221; published last year, contained only one Saudi writer, Abd al-Rahman Munif, who hardly ever lived there. Other Saudi authors, such as Ghazi Algosaibi, have tended to write about other places, Jordan or Cairo or Paris. Mr. Al-Mohaimeed, then, is an honest literary pioneer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Included on our list of best translations of 2007, Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed got a nice review in the NY Sun this. In fact, Ben Lytal goes so far as to point to this as the &#8220;First Great Saudi Novel&#8221;: Those Saudi novels that do get published \u2014 even those that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,1646,9056,9066,9076],"class_list":["post-258936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-review","tag-saudi-literature","tag-wolves-of-the-crescent-moon","tag-yousef-al-mohaimeed"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":327386,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258936\/revisions\/327386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}