Seen through the eyes of a strong-willed and perceptive young girl, “Naphtalene” beautifully captures the atmosphere of Baghdad in the 1940s and 1950s. Through her rich and lyrical descriptions, Alia Mamdouh vividly recreates a city of public steam baths, roadside, butchers and childhood games played in the same streets where political demonstrations against British colonialism […]
In this collection of his newest and shortest short stories, the Egyptian Nobel literature laureate has reduced the fictional form to its most essential level, while retaining his justifiably famous mastery of the storytelling art. A man finds that all the streets in his neighborhood have turned into a circus – but his joy at […]
Naguib Mahfouz, famed for his uncanny power to depict the real world, is equally ingenious at capturing the surreal, the otherworldly, and the supernatural. The ghostly side of Mahfouz’s fiction, though less well known than his other works, nonetheless remains a haunting presence. This collection of stories sifted from his later writings brings these restless […]
In Love in Exile Bahaa Taher presents multilayered variations on the themes of exile, disillusionment, failed dreams, and the redemptive power of love. Unwilling to recant his Nasserist beliefs, the unnamed narrator is an Egyptian journalist in a self-imposed exile in Europe after conflict with the management of his newspaper and a divorce from his […]
A riveting tale of innocence and dreams, misery and humour. After escaping to and then from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Cyprus and Tunisia, a young Iraqi lands up in Paris in the 1980s and as a homeless refugee walking the streets pursues his dream of making a film about his deaf-dumb father. ?A relentless raconteur […]
26 short stories from North Africa by both internationally renowned and emerging writers: Latifa Baqa; Ahmed Bouzfour; Rachida el-Charni; Mohamed Choukri; Tarek Eltayeb; Mohammed Dib ; Mansoura Ezeldin ; Gamal el-Ghitani ; Said Al Kafrawi ; Idriss el-Khouri
“What is madness?” asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy’s jittery, funny, and angry novel. Assuring readers that they are about to find out, the narrator takes us on a journey through the insanity of present-day Cairo – in and out of minibuses, malls, and crash pads, navigating the city’s pinball machine of social life with […]
Hamdi Abu Golayyel offers a striking portrait of a marginalized Egyptian community, bringing to life the absurd and tragic characters who occupy the margins of society while paying tribute to a historical Cairene neighbourhood. By turns comic, reverential, beautiful, and tawdry, the novel reveals a social climate where ruthlessness and goodness seem almost indistinguishable and […]
This winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature mingles memories of the past with the shifting voices of the present when the estranged son of an Iraqi exile flies from his home in Toronto to visit her in Paris. As his ailing mother, the once-vibrant Suhaila, lies in a hospital bed, he acquaints himself […]
“I didn’t fight, my dear man, for land or for history. I fought for the woman I loved.” In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son, Dr. Khaleel – who has no real medical qualifications – nurses […]