publication of Mohammed Kheir’s “Let Slip” in English translation

 publication of Mohammed Kheir’s “Let Slip” in English translation

Two Lines Press, based in the US, will publish Egyptian writer Mohammed Kheir’s novel Let Slip” (إفلات الأصابع) translated into English by Robin Moger. The novel was originally published in late 2018 by Al Kotob Khan for Publishing and Distribution in Cairo. Born in 1978, Kheir is among the most important writers of the contemporary literary scene in Egypt. He is the author of several collections of short stories and poetry and one previous novel, A Closer Sky, as well as being a prolific songwriter for the alternative musical scene in Egypt and Lebanon.

His published works include Radio Spectres, a poetry collection, which won Egypt’s Sawiris Cultural Award in 2010, short-story collection Eyeblink, which won the same prize in 2015, and now the most mature and affecting of his books, Let Slip.

Let Slip is a book of strange accounts, free-floating threads that tangle and knot as a story unfolds: a dead father returns to rule his household from beyond the grave, a man awakes on the outskirts of a strange town with no memory of how he arrived there, a woman sings every sound in the world. And then the line that binds them: a journey undertaken by Bahr, an Egyptian returned home after years abroad, and his amanuensis—our narrator—a journalist employed to to document Bahr’s tour of magically-imbued sites which offer us glimpses into a parallel and miraculous reality.

But the pilgrimage begins to expose cracks in the premises of the story we are being told. How reliable is our narrator? Even as the novel’s lines of incident and narrative intersect and cohere, these breaks and glitches widen, and we find ourselves in world that is bound by its own dissolution, which comes together as it comes apart.

Mohammed Kheir has written an astonishing and delicately powerful novel of identity and trauma, of exile, loss and revolution, a prose poem that weighs the collapse of individuals and buildings and societies alike against our capacity to love and endure.

Through its work as a literary agency, Al Kotob Khan for Publishing and Distribution has been able to introduce foreign publishers to its authors and establish their presence in literary scenes overseas. Our translated authors include Adel Esmat, Yasser Abdellatif, Eman Abdelrahim, Hassan Abdel Mawgoud, and most recently, Mohammed Kheir.