Rabat Review of Books
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Empire
The fantasy of the competent institution has always been empire in a better suit. A view from the receiving end.
Against the Algorithm: Why We Still Need Slow Reading
A defense of the long essay, the marginal note, and the afternoon spent with a single book.
The Ghosts of Fez: Walking a City That Remembers
A walking essay through the old medina — its doors, its libraries, its long afternoons of patient dust.
Kafka in Arabic: Translation as Second Creation
What happens to a modernist prose when it is rewritten, word by patient word, in another alphabet.
The file remains open. The mole was the institution itself.— from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Empire, in this issue
The Salt Notebooks
A début novel made from family letters — lucid, difficult, and quietly essential.
Atlantic Maghreb, 1400–1900
Morocco has always been a seafaring country. A new history finally gives the shore its due.
Apricot Year
A third collection, more patient — and more devastating — than anything that came before.
Three Poems from The Bou Regreg
A river poem sequence about the water that runs between Rabat and Salé — and between generations.
Ghazals for an Absent Friend
Two ghazal-inspired poems on distance, longing, and the attention owed to what is not here.
The Review believes that reading is a practice of attention — and that attention, in turn, is a small form of hospitality we offer to the world.
La Revue croit que la lecture est une pratique de l'attention — et que l'attention, à son tour, est une petite forme d'hospitalité que nous offrons au monde.
تؤمن المجلّة أنّ القراءة ممارسةٌ من ممارسات الانتباه، وأنّ الانتباه بدوره شكلٌ صغير من أشكال الضيافة التي نقدّمها للعالم.
Tangier, 1956
The last days of the International Zone, through the eyes of a British diplomat.
An Obscure Modernist
A new biography rescues a 20th-century North African intellectual from the footnotes.
The Fortnightly Letter
A biweekly note from the editors — new essays, a forthcoming review, a poem to take with you on the commute.