Reviews & Criticism (mainstream press)

New Film is like Aladdin for Adults” | New Lines Magazine, 25 August 2022

The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” | New Lines Magazine, 15 April 2022

Feast and Fight: A New Adaptation of ‘Samak the Ayyar’” | LA Review of Books, 9 January 2022

In Alaa al-Aswany’s New Novel, Dictatorship Keeps Winning” | Foreign Policy,
1 August 2021
***Featured in Enterprise Press, a business news briefing in Egypt, 2 August 2021
***Featured in The Business Standard, an Indian daily newspaper, 3 August 2021

Najwan Darwish’s Poems Turn Self-Doubt into Inner Resolve in
Exhausted on the Cross” | Words Without Borders, 13 April 2021

A 13th-Century Guide to Fraud and Skulduggery” | The Spectator, 5 November 2020
***Featured in The New Criterion weekly roundup, 6 November 2020

Surviving Hard Times with al-Hariri” | Public Books, 7 October 2020
***Featured in JSTOR Daily, 13 October 2020

Jinn and Tonic: Medieval Islam’s Celebrity Doctors” | Al-Jumhuriya English, 21 August 2020

A Grand Turk in Washington” | The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2020
***Featured in RealClearBooks, 10 April 2020

Full-Bodied” | The Times Literary Supplement, 22 November 2019

A Warrior Poet of Pre-Islamic Arabia” | LA Review of Books, 14 September 2018

Like a Bride: The Qur’an and Arabic Prose” | LA Review of Books, 6 July 2018