São Paulo – The Lebanese writer Iman Humaydan (pictured above) will join an online discussion to be hosted by publishing house Editora Tabla this week. Humaydan organized the anthology Beirut Noir, released this year in Brazil by Tabla. The live stream will take place at 5 pm on Friday (16), via Tabla’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.
The discussion marking the book’s launch will be entitled ‘Beirut Noir: chronicles of a city and its scars. Speakers will include Johnny Temple, the publisher and organizer of the Noir series, which the book devoted to Lebanon’s capital is a part of.
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Also featured will be the translator Pedro Martins Criado and Felipe Benjamin, who’s in the Tabla translator team and will moderate the discussion. The conversation will air live in English; subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese will be made available after-the-fact on Tabla’s social media. “The book is a collection of several contemporary Lebanese authors,” explained Benjamin.
The noir genre
The discussion will revolve around noir as a literary genre in the work of contemporary Arab writers. Speakers will go into the usual topics of the genre: the decadence of urban societies, violence and the darker aspects of human personality.
Beirut Noir is part of a series conceived by Tim MacLoughlin and Johnny Temple, of New York’s Akashic Book, and launched in 2004. The project features local writers who possess deep knowledge of their cities, each of whom writes a brand new noir tale.
Humaydan handled writer selection and organization for Beirut Noir. The book comprises 15 tales by 14 Lebanese authors and one Palestinian born and raised in Beirut. The tales are set in the city, and they reveal the deep wounds left by decades of Civil War fighting. The anthology was translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Pedro Criado.
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
