Laziness in the Fertile Valley

Laziness in the Fertile Valley
Author: Albert Cossery
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811218740

A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile" Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery’s biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle — slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another savagely defends the household from women. Serag, the youngest, is the only member of the family interested in getting a job. But even he — try as he might — has a hard time resisting the call of laziness.

Laziness in the Fertile Valley

Laziness in the Fertile Valley
Author: Albert Cossery
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811219933

A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile" Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery’s biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle — slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another savagely defends the household from women. Serag, the youngest, is the only member of the family interested in getting a job. But even he — try as he might — has a hard time resisting the call of laziness.

A Splendid Conspiracy

A Splendid Conspiracy
Author: Albert Cossery
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2010-05-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811221261

Three friends in a small Egyptian city celebrate idleness, elegance, and joie de vivre. Summoned home to Egypt after a long European debauch (disguised as “study”), our hero Teymour—in the opening line of A Splendid Conspiracy—is feeling “as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.” Poor Teymour sits forlorn in a provincial café, a far cry from his beloved Paris. Two old friends, however, rescue him. They applaud his phony diploma as perfect in “a world where everything is false” and they draw him into their hedonistic rounds as gentlemen of leisure. Life, they explain, “while essentially pointless is extremely interesting.” The small city may seem tedious, but there are women to seduce, powerful men to tease, and also strange events: rich notables are disappearing. Eyeing the machinations of our three pleasure seekers and nervous about the missing rich men, the authorities soon see—in complex schemes to bed young girls—signs of political conspiracies. The three young men, although mistaken for terrorists, enjoy freedom, wit, and romance. After all, though “not every man is capable of appreciating what is around him,” the conspirators in pleasure certainly do.

The Colors of Infamy

The Colors of Infamy
Author: Albert Cossery
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2011-11-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811217957

A gentleman pickpocket, elegant to the bone, plies the best cafes of Cairo. Ossama is a thief: "not a minister, banker or real estate developer - a modest thief". His country may be a disaster but he is a hedonist, convinced that "nothing on this Earth is tragic for an intelligent man". In one fat victims wallet, he discovers a highly compromising letter, revealing bribery, corrupt ministers, and lethally shoddy building practices. He decides he must act...

Sunday After the War

Sunday After the War
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 159
Release: 1944-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 081122404X

"I always carry over 40,000 gold francs about with me in my belt. They weight about 40 pounds, and I am beginning to get dysentery from the load." A collection of stories and excerpts from longer works.

The Colossus of Maroussi

The Colossus of Maroussi
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-05-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811218570

Henry Miller’s landmark travel book, now reissued in a new edition, is ready to be stuffed into any vagabond’s backpack. Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman’s seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the “colossus” of Miller’s book, stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis with his own loud crowing; cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village’s single stove, and they stay in hotels that “have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past.”

The Air-conditioned Nightmare

The Air-conditioned Nightmare
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1970
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780811201063

His stories and essays celebrate those rare individuals (famous and obscure) whose creative resilience and mere existence oppose the mechanization of minds and souls.

The Henry Miller Reader

The Henry Miller Reader
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1969
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811201117

A collection of works spanning the entire career of great 20th-century American writer Henry Miller, edited and introduced by Lawrence Durrell.

The Hospital

The Hospital
Author: Ahmed Bouanani
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811225771

A tour de force: an utterly singular modern Moroccan classic “When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…” So begins Ahmed Bouanani’s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital’s iron gate disappears. Like Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka—or perhaps like Mann’s The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder—The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.

From Your Capricorn Friend

From Your Capricorn Friend
Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1984
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811208918

Presents the best of Miller's contributions to Stroker magazine, which included prose, letters, and drawings ranging in subject matter from his daily activities to Isaac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.