Rabih Alameddine & John Freeman — The Penguin Book of the International Short Story
Novelists Rabih Alameddine and editor John Freeman discuss the global short story tradition, translation, and what gets lost when English dominates literary culture.
Why we picked this
Freeman has edited two decades' worth of international fiction at Granta and elsewhere; Alameddine writes from the exact intersection of Arabic and American literary culture this anthology addresses. The conversation will be specific.
The Penguin Book of the International Short Story is John Freeman’s attempt to map a form across languages and cultures — gathering stories from writers whose work rarely travels into English-language publishing with the attention it deserves. The anthology spans continents and decades, making the argument that the short story is one of literature’s most elastic forms precisely because it travels so well between traditions.
Rabih Alameddine is the Lebanese-American novelist behind An Unnecessary Woman and The Angel of History — books that sit deliberately between Arabic and American literary sensibilities. His presence in this conversation brings a perspective that’s personal as well as critical: he writes in a language that is not his mother tongue, for an audience that may not know his literary inheritance.
John Freeman has spent his career at the edge of English-language publishing — as editor of Granta, as literary editor of the Boston Globe, as the editor of several Freeman’s anthologies. His conversations about literature tend to be genuinely critical rather than promotional. This event at Union Market is a rare chance to hear two people think seriously about what world literature actually means.