For the first time this year, The White Review Poet’s Prize was open to poets based anywhere in the world. Last month we announced a shortlist of eight poets. ...
Youssef Rakha is a writer and photographer from Cairo. He has seven books in Arabic, including collections of poems, essays, and fiction, several travelogues, and one novel. His work in English has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Banipal, and The Kenyon Review, among others. A translation of his novel The Crocodiles, the first in a trilogy, is due in Autumn 2014 from Seven Stories Press.
Trying to figure out what marks contemporary literature as contemporary is a deceptively complicated job because the concept of contemporaneity at stake is itself...
