Libyan Novel

Charis Olszok is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Newnham College. Her first monograph, The Libyan Novel: Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulnerability (EUP, 2020), charted the Libyan novel through its vision of human and nonhuman entanglement. Since then, she has published on ecology, oil and the fantastic in Arabic literature. She has also translated several works of Arabic fiction into English.

• Introduction: A Nation of OthersPart I: Survival1. Animal Fable in Novels of Survival2. The Primordial TurnPart II: Signs and Cityscapes3. God’s Wide Land: War, Melancholy and the Camel4. Absent Stories in the Urban NovelPart III Children of the Land5. Too-Long-a-Tale6. ‘Une histoire de mouche’: Libyan Novels in Other VoicesAfterword: Breaking Fevers and Strange MetamorphosesNotes; Bibliography; Index

Charis Olszok's The Libyan Novel is an original and welcomed contribution to the overlooked Libyan culture and creative writing. It goes beyond the negative representations of Libyan society and culture such as terrorism and dictatorship. The book presents a careful reading of the Libyan novel through new themes of literature, animals and nature.