Even the most unlikely Arab countries hold book fairs nowadays, many of them with the cachet "International" attached to their title. They are generally promoted as a sign of modernity, progress and cultural development – though I still find it hard to take most of them seriously. Far too often they reflect what the regimes consider to be fit for public consumption rather than what the brightest Arab writers are actually saying. Imagine, for example, the kind of items that would be chosen by the Tunisian ministry of culture for the Damascus International Book Fair.

In an article for al-Ahram Weekly, Mohammad Shoair discusses a list of 120 Egyptian titles banned from this month's Kuwait International Book Fair. While noting that the Cairo fair is not averse to such practices either, and that Egyptian publishers have been banned en bloc for the Algerian book fair (apparently because of continuing anger over the football riots last year), Shoair says:

"The list of banned books [at the Kuwait fair] is reasonably representative of Egyptian literature, covering the entire spectrum from most of the work of the veteran political analyst Mohammad Hassanin Heikal, through novels by Gamal El-Ghitani, Khairy Shalaby, the late Abdel-Hakim Qassim, Ibrahim Aslan, Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, Youssef El-Qa'id, Mohammad El-Mansi Qandil, Ahdaf Soweif, everything by Alaa El-Aswany (one bookshop [in Kuwait] was shut down last year after displaying his novel Chicago) as well as Galal Amin's autobiography, Fahmy Howeidi and Mohammad Emara."

The list, Shoair says, shows no sign "of an underlying principle or logic" – though he finds this less less surprising than the reaction of publishers who, perhaps because they are so accustomed to this sort of thing happening, do not appear concerned about it.

In Yemen, meanwhile, a group of writers and intellectuals have been boycotting the Sana'a Book Fair (run by the ministry of culture), which ends on Tuesday. They complained about the exclusion of fiction, the absence of "well-known publishing houses" and the inclusion of large numbers of takfiri-type religious books.