Copies of Fadi Zaghmout’s third novel, Laila and the Lamb, have been stopped from entering Jordan. Just as Kuwaiti readers were protesting the extensive censorship that has become part of literary life there, particularly in the past five years — which ArabLit will be covering more extensively — Zaghmout wrote about his own frustrating experience in Jordan: 

Zaghmout, who began his writing life as a popular Jordanian blogger, has two previous novels: the bloggish Bride of Amman, which was translated to English by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, and the spec-fic Heaven on Earth, translated to English by Sawad Hussein.

For his third novel, Laila and the Lamb, Zaghmout said he wanted to write a “radical feminist book,” inspired by Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. He wanted Laila to be a sexually dominant woman “because I believe that the mainstream cultural assumes that women are in general…