By Erin L. Cox

In this week’s The New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont writes an interesting piece on the contemporary Arabic novel and the movement to increase the English-translation of Arabic works through Abu Dhabi’s Arabic Prize.  In the article, Pierpont heralds some of the great Arabic writers — Nobel Prize winning Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa Al Aswany, and Elias Khoury to name a few of the writers from the 22 nations that make up Arabic-speaking world. 

While Pierpont’s piece was interesting and informative, I do hope she’s wrong when she says that “Nobody is under the illusion that literature can change the world.”