Red Emma’s

A man wakes every day to find coins under his pillow, a young lonely girl strikes up a friendship with a spectral voice, a veiled woman changes form to delude ordinary senses, a petite girl in all black breaches a group of young girls returning from a wedding, a goat and her two kids draw an unsuspecting young man into a hidden room, a group of curious boys conjure the spirit of Marx. Jinns and ghouls, guardians and tricksters, wizards and possessors. In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Unseen beings are a natural element of everyday life.

With rich, vivid descriptions and in stunning illustrations, Ahmad Nabil weaves a literary account of paranormal stories: held, shared in whisper networks, relayed over conversations, and passed down as inheritance. This English translation by Fatema Alhashemi traces a captivating world largely unseen in popular narrative.

Hidden Companions is forthcoming on May 21, 2026 from Radix Co-Op in collaboration with the Fiction Council. Artist Jenna Hamed is the lead coordinator of the project in the US.

About the Author / Illustrator

Ahmad Nabil (b. 1988) is a Palestinian, Jerusalem-based visual artist, researcher, and educator whose practice is deeply focused on documenting encounters with the unseen dimensions of everyday life, as part of Palestinian intangible heritage. He is the founder of The Fiction Council (est. 2015) in Jerusalem, a platform dedicated to Palestinian imagination through the research of Arab and Islamic mythology, superstitions, and paranormal phenomena, and their reactivation through interdisciplinary creative practices. Nabil is the author and illustrator of Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem, a documentation of supernatural testimonies from Jerusalem. Hidden Companions is available in the US in the original Arabic text and in an English Translation at Radix Co-op.

About the Translator

Fatema Alhashemi is a writer, artist, and translator based in New York City. She has translated several poetry collections, including Remember I Was a Good Man by Ahmed Saleh and Ash and Air by Nadine Murtaja. She is currently writing an Arabic-language short story collection that reimagines global mythology through contemporary characters set in imagined Arab cities.

About the Presenter

Jenna Hamed is an artist and art worker based in Queens, New York with roots in Jerusalem, Palestine. Jenna’s background in tactile-driven analog practices and critical examination of art production has influenced her current interests in documentation methods via image-making, poetics, archiving through the book format. In 2024, she established Jay Seven Inc., a studio-gallery in Brooklyn dedicated to producing art installations and publishing initiatives rooted in craft, research and constraints.