Midaq Alley

Midaq Alley
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101974664

Widely acclaimed as Naguib Mahfouz's best novel, Midaq Alley brings to life one of the hustling, teeming back alleys of Cairo in the 1940s. From Zaita the cripple-maker to Kirsha the hedonistic cafe owner, from Abbas the barber who mistakes greed for love to Hamida who sells her soul to escape the alley, from waiters and widows to politicians, pimps, and poets, the inhabitants of Midaq Alley vividly evoke Egypt's largest city as it teeters on the brink of change. Never has Nobel Prize-winner Mahfouz's talent for rich and luxurious storytelling been more evident than here, in his portrait of one small street as a microcosm of the world on the threshold of modernity.

Children of the Alley

Children of the Alley
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525431586

The tumultuous alley of this rich and intricate novel (first published in Arabic in 1959) is inhabited by a delightful Egyptian family, but is also the setting for a second, hidden, and more daring narrative: the spiritual history of humankind. The men and women of a modern Cairo neighborood unwittingly reenact the lives of their holy ancestors: from the feudal lord who disowns one son for diabolical pride and puts another to the test, to the savior of a succeeding generation who frees his people from bondage. This powerful novel confirms again the richness and variety of Mahfouz's storytelling and his status as "the single most important writer in modern Arabic literature" (Newsweek).

Autumn Quail

Autumn Quail
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525431667

Autumn Quail is a tale of moral responsibility, alienation, and political downfall featuring a corrupt young bureaucrat, Isa ad-Dabbagh, who is one of the early victims of the purge after the 1952 Revolution in Egypt. The conflict between his emotional instincts and his gradual intellectual acceptance of the Revolution forms the framework for a remarkable portrait of the clash between past and present, a portrait that is ultimately an optimistic one in which the two will peacefully coexist.

The Search

The Search
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525431691

A powerful story of lust, greed and murder. Unflinching, tough, and dramatic, The Search was most certainly intended to be a harsh criticism of Post-Revolution morality, but, on its most elemental level, it is a lurid and compelling tale.

The Day the Leader Was Killed

The Day the Leader Was Killed
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2008-11-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307483614

From the Nobel Prize laureate and author of the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, a beguiling and artfully compact novel set in Sadat's Egypt. The time is 1981, Anwar al-Sadat is president, and Egypt is lurching into the modern world. Set against this backdrop, The Day the Leader Was Killed relates the tale of a middle-class Cairene family. Rich with irony and infused with political undertones, the story is narrated alternately by the pious and mischievous family patriarch Muhtashimi Zayed, his hapless grandson Elwan, and Elwan's headstrong and beautiful fiancee Randa. The novel reaches its climax with the assassination of Sadat on October 6, 1981, an event around which the fictional plot is skillfully woven. The Day the Leader Was Killed brings us the essence of Mahfouz's genius and is further proof that he has, in the words of the Nobel citation, "formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind."

Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories

Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories
Author: Ghassān Kanafānī
Publisher: Three Continents Press
Total Pages: 117
Release: 1999
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780894108570

This collection of important stories by novelist, journalist, teacher and Palestinina activist Ghassan Kanafani includes 'Men in the Sun,' the basis of the film 'The Deceived.' Also in the volume are 'The Land of Sad Oranges', 'If You Were A Horse', 'The Falcon' and 'Letter from Gaza.'

Adrift on the Nile

Adrift on the Nile
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 177
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385423330

First published in 1966, Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile is an atmospheric novel that dramatizes the rootlessness of Egypt’s cosmopolitan middle class. Anis Zani is a bored and drug-addicted civil servant who is barely holding on to his job. Every evening he hosts a gathering on a houseboat on the Nile, where he and a motley group of cynical and aimless friends share a water pipe full of kif, a mixture of tobacco and marijuana. When a young female journalist—an “alarmingly serious person”—joins them and begins secretly documenting their activities, the group’s harmony starts disintegrating, culminating in a midnight joyride that ends in tragedy.

Miramar

Miramar
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525431594

This highly charged fable set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the late 1960s, centers on the guests of the Pension Miramar as they compete for the attention of the young servant Zohra. Zohra is a beautiful peasant girl who fled her family to escape an arranged marriage. She becomes the focus of jealousies and conflicts among the Miramar's residents, who include an assortment of radicals and aristocrats floundering in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. It becomes clear that the uneducated but strong-willed Zohra is the only one among them who knows what she wants. As the situation spirals toward violence and tragedy, the same sequence of events is retold from the perspective of four different residents, in the manner of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, weaving a nuanced portrait of the intricacies of post-revolutionary Egyptian life.

Affective Disorders

Affective Disorders
Author: Bede Scott
Publisher: Postcolonialism Across the Dis
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786941708

Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solely at the level of character, individual psychology, or the contingencies of plotting, but could also be related to broader sociopolitical forces.