This controversial bestselling novel in the Arab world reveals the political corruption, sexual repression, religious extremism, and modern hopes of Egypt today.
All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed "scientist of women"; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent...
This controversial bestselling novel in the Arab world reveals the political corruption, sexual repression, religious extremism, and modern hopes o...
Known and loved throughout Egypt as a work that celebrates the national character, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz s Thebes at War tells of a high point in Egyptian history ancient Egypt s defeat of Asiatic foreigners who had dominated northern Egypt for two hundred years. With a visit from a court official and a provocative insult, the southern pharaoh s long simmering resentment boils over, leading him to commit himself and his heirs to an epic struggle for the throne. Filled with the grand clash of armies, staggering defeats, daring escapes, and glorious victories, and written at...
Known and loved throughout Egypt as a work that celebrates the national character, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz s Thebes at War tells of a hig...
Written in mid-17th century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, which also takes examples of mock-rural...
Written in mid-17th century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions and absurd...
Private Pleasures describes the three-day sex, drink, and drug binge of a thirty-something newsreader in the back streets and crumbling apartments of his native Giza, that pullulating mass of humanity that, like an ugly sister, sits opposite Cairo on the Nile's west bank. Pursued by an unshakable sense of impending doom that is only partly attributable to fear of retribution at the hands of a sadistic police officer with whose wife he is conducting a frenzied affair, the narrator observes, with fascinated horror, his own stumbling progress through a world of menace and wonder inhabited by...
Private Pleasures describes the three-day sex, drink, and drug binge of a thirty-something newsreader in the back streets and crumbling apartments of ...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq, ' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq, ' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure i...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq, ' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights,...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq, ' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the int...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq, ' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights,...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq, ' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the int...
This collection of fourteen connected stories and a novella, From the Secret History of Numan Abdel Hafez, takes us deep into Upper Egypt and the village of Dayrut al-Sharif, in which Mohamed Mustagab was born. To depict a world renowned for its poverty, ignorance, vendettas, and implacable code of honor, Mustagab deploys the black humor and Swiftian sarcasm of the insider who knows his society only too well. When the stillness of a day's end is shattered by a single gunshot, poignant beauty merges seamlessly into horror, and when a police officer seeking to unravel a murder finds himself...
This collection of fourteen connected stories and a novella, From the Secret History of Numan Abdel Hafez, takes us deep into Upper Egypt and the vill...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of -the Fariyaq, - alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights,...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of -the Fariyaq, - alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the ...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of -the Fariyaq, - alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights,...
Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of -the Fariyaq, - alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the ...
