A Bit of Air

Award-winning Egyptian children’s author and illustrator Walid Taher targets a wider audience with A Bit of Air. Inspired by the long tradition of Egyptian colloquial poetry and its relation to social and political movements in Egypt, Taher creates a unique blend of visual art, poetry, and architecture. These darkly humorous poems and their accompanying images are snapshots of a state of mind and a space of fantasy that convey the absurd, the comical, the profound, and the idiosyncratic.

This illustrated, bilingual edition comes at a time of political and literary upheaval. An unprecedented number of Arab authors are producing new and noteworthy works by appropriating the language of blogs, poetry, comic strips, and film, to name a few. This mixing of media gives shape to new experiences emerging from and redefining a rapidly changing social and political reality. A new generation is ushering in a new language, a new literature, and a new Arab world.