A journey through Central Asia and beyond, Moon over Samarqand is the story of one Egyptian’s quest for the truth. Seeking explanations to his troubled past through a long-lost friend in Samarqand, Ali’s travel brings him into encounters with the Uzbekistan of today, yesterday, and once upon a time. His tale embraces many tales—those of […]
Anne-Marie Drosso’s novelistic mentors, of whom she is worthy, are suggested by allusions to Stendhal, Chekhov, Proust and Galsworthy, while her brilliant use of indirection provides some of the excitement of a good detective story. Her picture of Cairo, moreover, as seen throughout several decades from a particular social altitude, is moving, accurate and just.
This collection offers up a mix of previously published and new works, creating a literary road map to Arab American literature today. The nineteen authors represented are of Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Libyan descent, some with established reputations, others new young writers. They tell tales about Muslims and Christians, recent immigrants and fully assimilated […]
Two Iraqi exiles reach Switzerland, having escaped from Saddam’s Iraq. One of them, Adam, has brought with him an old flask found among the possessions of his late father. He polishes it and a fabulously beautiful nubile young woman appears. She has, it emerges, been the lover of his ancestors going back five thousand years. […]
The themes in this unusual collection of short stories range from the lost innocence of childhood, betrayal, greed and the battlefield of sex, to the courage of old age.’
The Open Door explores a middle-class Egyptian girl’s coming of sexual and political age, in the context of the Egyptian nationalist movement. Young Layla and her brother become involved in the student activism of the 1940s and early 1950s and in the popular resistance to continued imperialist rule. The novel traces the pressures on young […]
A novel by an Algerian author, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, in which the narrator weaves ancestral tales with the calamitous present, as the fabric of the Islamic community is ruptured in the name of progress.