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Abdellah Taïa. An Arab Melancholia. Frank Stock, tr. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e) (MIT Press, distr.). 2012. isbn 9781584351115
Abdellah Taïa's Une mélancolie arabe was published in 2008 in Paris, where he now lives. It is in many ways a continuation of his early autobiographical texts, lyrically chronicling his experiences as a gay man-which can be a predicament, to put it mildly, in his native Morocco, where homosexuality is still a crime, punishable by up to three years in jail. As in his previous fictional works-Mon Maroc (2000), Le rouge du tarbouche (2004), and L'armée du salut (2006)-Taïa's narrator is a sensitive and gifted young man from a poor Moroccan family, fascinated by music and...