Recently Published Books

On the eighth of last July appeared the book "In the Boat of Life" by the poet Mohammed Youssef Hammoud. Sheikh Said Takieddine says in his introduction to the book:

"This book is poetry. In that there is description and praise alike. It draws its music from two springs: a catastrophe that befell a soldier who lost his commander and his comrades in a battle of right wrestling with falsehood — and these are tempests; in our country, a new story... And she whom he loved and who loved him — and these are breezes, a tale more ancient than history... They are two principal experiences, the father of literature and its mother, and they have begotten a poet.

"In the Boat of Life" is flashes of goodness which the poet Mohammed Youssef Hammoud has laden with the teeming hopes of his people and the tremors of his tender heart, so that they came forth pulsing with living national visions and with delicate, ardent feelings..

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• Last month there appeared from "Dar al-Kitab," Beirut, "The Gold Bug," a collection of stories by the father of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe, some hundred years after his death. The book comprises thirteen stories selected from the great American storyteller and poet...

"The Gold Bug" was translated into Arabic by Mr. Najati Sidqi, one of those who have treated the short story at length along the two paths of translation and original composition. He said in his introduction to the book: "The life of Edgar Allan Poe is the fierce story of a man who entered a world where the specters of misery and pain jostle shoulder to shoulder, and came out with shattered nerves, bereft of consciousness — but he left behind a wealth of stories and poetry that placed him in the ranks of the immortals."

The stories of Edgar Poe bear a special stamp: psychological and mental analysis, and a leaning toward imagination and fantasy; and for that they are the best that can be offered to the readers of Arabic, in an age that takes reason and logic as the foundation of every science.