Acknowledgments; Note on Transliteration and Translation; Introduction: Historical Transformations: Framing a New Consciousness in the Contemporary Egyptian Nove; 1. History and Representation of Otherness in ᶜAli Idris’s al-Nubi and Bahaᵓ Tahir’s Wahat al-ghurub; 2. Reading Cosmopolitanism in Yusuf Zaydan’s Azazeel and Muᶜtazz Futayha’s Akhir yahud al-iskandariyya; 3.The Irrecuperable Heterogeneity of the Present in ᶜAlaᵓ al-Aswani’s The Yacoubian Building and Chicago; 4. Heart Deserts, Memory and Myth between Life and Death in Asharaf al-Khumaysi’s Manafi al-rabb and Miral al-Tahawi’s The Tent; Epilogue: New Directions.