ArabLit Quarterly emerged in 2018 from the community around the ArabLit website and Bulaq podcast. It aims to bring out beautiful literary translations from Arabic, fresh work by Arab artists, and also new forms of literary criticism that re-frame the discussions around Arabic literature, translation, and art. In our pages, you can find classical Arabic recipes in translation, illuminative infographics, and literary playlists.

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Our summer 2020 issue of ARABLIT QUARTERLY features crime stories, crime puzzles, crime poems, and meditations on the nature of crime.

We start off with al-Tanukhi, and what is surely the most wonderfully weird crime story from the whole of the tenth century, translated here by Melanie Magidow, and a song of the Banu Sassan, translated by Brad Fox. From the early thirteenth century, we have a phrasebook of criminal terminology from across the region, from al-Jawbari's "Book of Charlatans," translated here by Humphrey Davies, and from Egypt's Golden Age of Crime Writing -- the mid-twentieth century -- we have a crime puzzle for you to solve, as well as two noir shorts, translated by Doaa Hafez.

We also have contemporary crime -- meditations on the genre by Nael Eltoukhy, short stories from Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan, and an "Evidence Room" curated by Nadia Ghanem: weapons used in Maghrebi crime fiction.

Note that in the final recipe -- reputed to have been used to poison a poet for his satirical verse -- the poison should not be included.