Combines the styles of memoir, history, anthropology, and theory to develop an innovative reflection on the materiality of culture. Through its style and content, the text challenges the Orientalist bifurcation between tradition and modernity in the Arab world, revealing instead tradition's own dynamism and its coexistence alongside modernity.

Set in the ancient Upper Egyptian village of Karnak against the backdrop of the British campaigns in Sudan, the Second World War, and the war in Palestine, The Collar and the Bracelet is the stunning saga of the Bishari family a family ripped apart by the violence of history, the dark conduits of human desire, and the rigid social conventions of village life. In a series of masterful narrative circles and repetitions, the novella traces the grim intrigues of Hazina al-Bishari and the inexorable destinies of her son, the exile and notorious bandit Mustafa, her daughter Fahima, tortured by...

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, which was founded in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War and the Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party and left political life--and published shortly after she committed suicide--the book offers a poignant look at, and reckoning with, the Marxism of her generation and the role of militant intellectuals in the tragic failure of both the national liberation project and the communist project in Egypt. The powerful critique in The Stillborn...