Download or read book Stones of Bobello written by Idwār Kharrāṭ and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic work of fiction from Edwar al-Kharrat, who has been described by Doris Lessing

Download or read book stones of bobello written by edwar al kharrat and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Last Chapter written by Leila Abouzeid and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2003-02-01 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thought-provoking, semi-autobiographical book tells the story of Aisha, a young Moroccan woman, and her struggle to find an identity in the Morocco of the second half of the twentieth century. Charting Aisha's path through adolescence and young adulthood up to the present, her story is told through a series of flashbacks, anecdotes, and glimpses of the past, all bound up with a strong, often strident, always compelling worldview that takes in Morocco, its politics, people, and traditions, Islam, and marriage. Male female relationships feature strongly in the narrative, and by exposing us to Aisha's troubled romantic encounters, Abouzeid uncovers the shifting male/female roles within the Morocco of her lifetime. Many aspects of Moroccan society are also explored through the other clashes of the modern and the traditional in Aisha's life. The workplace and corruption, the struggle for women's rights, the clash between Islamic and Western values as well as with the older practices of sorcery and witchcraft, and the conflict between colonial and native language use are all intertwined in a narrative that is both forceful and often poetic. Through a series of tales of emotional disasters, the reader becomes aware not only of Aisha's frustrations but also of her deep commitment to her country and her struggle to defeat suffering, uphold justice, and retain a fierce independence as a woman and a clarity of conviction in her life. Leila Abouzeid is a pioneer among her Moroccan contemporaries in that she writes in Arabic rather than in French and is the first Moroccan woman writer of literature to be translated into English. This stimulating and revealing book adds a new perspective to Maghrebi women's writing, and is an important addition to the growing body of Arab women's writing in translation.

Download or read book Modern Arabic Literature written by Paul Starkey and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to Modern Arabic Literature, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present

Download or read book Morning and Evening Talk written by Najīb Maḥfūẓ and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A late work by the Egyptian Nobel literature laureate, Morning and Evening Talk is an epic tale of Egyptian life over five generations. Set in Cairo, it traces the fortunes of three families from the arrival of Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century to the 1980s, using short character sketches arranged in alphabetical order. This highly experimental device produces a kind of biographical dictionary, whose individual entries come together to paint a vivid portrait of life in Cairo from a range of different perspectives. The characters include representatives of every class and human type, and as the intricate family saga unfolds, a powerful picture of a society in transition--and the accompanying upheaval--emerges. This is a tale of change and continuity, of the death of a traditional way of life, of the road to independence and beyond, seen through the eyes of Egypt's citizens. Naguib Mahfouz's last chronicle of Cairo is an elegy to a bygone era and a tribute to the Egyptian spirit. It is also one of his most technically innovative contributions to the Arabic novel.

Download or read book Nile Sparrows written by Ibrahim Aslan and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the author's own Nile-side neighborhood of Warraq, Aslan's second novel, the first to be translated and published in English, chronicles the daily rhythm of life of rural migrants to Cairo and their complex webs of familial and neighborly relations over half a century. It opens with the mysterious disappearance of the tiny grandmother, Hanem, who is over 100 years old and is last seen by her daughter-in-law Dalal. Dalal does not have the heart to tell Hanem that her grown children Nargis and Abdel Reheem have both been dead for some time. Her grandson Mr. Abdalla, who has children of his own and not a few flecks of gray in his hair, reluctantly sets out for their home village to search for her, embarking on a bittersweet odyssey into his family's past and a confrontation with his own aging. In an elliptical narrative, Aslan limns a series of vignettes that mimic the workings of memory, moving backward and forward in time and held together by a series of recurrent figures and images. There is Abdalla's father, the tragic al-Bahey Uthman; his quirky and earthy uncle Abdel Reheem; and his sweet mother, Nargis, who dies with her simplest desires unfulfilled. Aslan's moving portrait of the quotidian dramas that constitute the lives of ordinary Egyptians is untainted by populist pretensions or belittling romanticism, and full of the humor and heartbreaking pathos that have become trademarks of the author's style.

Download or read book The Smiles of the Saints written by Ibrahim Farghali and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I have returned to settle my account. . . .” Told through the voices of a group of close friends and spanning a generation, The Smiles of the Saints is an epic story condensed into a short, intricate novel. Twenty-year-old Haneen has just returned to Egypt after an absence of fifteen years spent mostly in a Parisian boarding school, cut off from all family save for sporadic visits from her father, Rami. She has been summoned back by her father’s twin sister, who gives her an envelope containing his diaries, the last section of which is missing. Reading Rami’s account of the passionate love affairs and tortured spiritual adventures of his youth, Haneen begins to unravel the riddle of a family she has barely known. Herself the child of a Muslim–Christian marriage, Haneen, in love with a Jewish man, is considering adding a further religious dimension to her family. But someone is carefully watching the proceedings, a figure from the past. Who exactly is this, and what stake does he have in Haneen’s return? Couched in a pervasive air of mystery, Ibrahim Farghali’s novel is resonant with observations on the intricacies of human entanglements.

Download or read book The Long Way Back written by Fuad al-Takarli and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multigenerational family story of modern Iraq

Download or read book The Collar and the Bracelet written by Yahya Taher Abdullah and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the ancient Upper Egyptian village of Karnak against the backdrop of the British campaigns in Sudan, the Second World War, and the war in Palestine, The Collar and the Bracelet is the stunning saga of the Bishari family a family ripped apart by the violence of history, the dark conduits of human desire, and the rigid social conventions of village life. In a series of masterful narrative circles and repetitions, the novella traces the grim intrigues of Hazina al-Bishari and the inexorable destinies of her son, the exile and notorious bandit Mustafa, her daughter Fahima, tortured by guilt and secret passion, and the tragic doom of her beautiful granddaughter Nabawiya. Yahya Taher Abdullah's haunting prose distills the rhythmic lyricism of the folk story and weaves it into a uniquely modernist narrative tapestry of love and revenge that beautifully captures the timeless pharaonic landscapes of Upper Egypt and the blind struggles of its inhabitants against poverty, exploitation, and time themes that are echoed and amplified in the short stories included in this volume, which span the breadth of Abdullah's tragically short career as one of Egypt's most brilliant writers of modern fiction.

Download or read book The Mirage written by محفوظ، نجيب، and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychological study of the first order with a subtly Freudian flavor, The Mirage is the autobiographical account of Kamil Ru'ba, a tortured soul who finds himself struggling unduly to cope with life's challenges. The internal torment and angst that dog him throughout his life and the tragic, ironic turns of events that overtake him as a young man are, to a great extent, the outworkings of his faulty upbringing. At the same time, they work together to drive home the novel's underlying theme: the illusory, undependable nature of the world in which we live and the call to seek, beyond the outward and the ephemeral, that which is inward and enduring. The narrative, full of pathos, draws the reader unwittingly into a vicarious experience of Kamil's agonies and ecstasies. As such, it is a specimen of Mahfouz's prose at its finest.

Download or read book Postcolonialism Cross Examined written by Monika Albrecht and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-19 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a strikingly interdisciplinary and global approach, Postcolonialism Cross-Examined reflects on the current status of postcolonial studies and attempts to break through traditional boundaries, creating a truly comparative and genuinely global phenomenon. Drawing together the field of mainstream postcolonial studies with post-Soviet postcolonial studies and studies of the late Ottoman Empire, the contributors in this volume question many of the concepts and assumptions we have become accustomed to in postcolonial studies, creating a fresh new version of the field. The volume calls the merits of the field into question, investigating how postcolonial studies may have perpetuated and normalized colonialism as an issue exclusive to Western colonial and imperial powers. The volume is the first to open a dialogue between three different areas of postcolonial scholarship that previously developed independently from one another: • the wide field of postcolonial studies working on European colonialism, • the growing field of post-Soviet postcolonial/post-imperial studies, • the still fledgling field of post-Ottoman postcolonial/post-imperial studies, supported by sideways glances at the multidirectional conditions of interaction in East Africa and the East and West Indies. Postcolonialism Cross-Examined looks at topics such as humanism, nationalism, multiculturalism, nostalgia, and the Anthropocene in order to piece together a new, broader vision for postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century. By including territories other than those covered by the postcolonial mainstream, the book strives to reframe the “postcolonial” as a genuinely global phenomenon and develop multidirectional postcolonial perspectives.

Download or read book Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction written by Ramadan Yasmine Ramadan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1960s Egypt a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction explores how this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment with the project of the postcolonial nation-state in Egypt. Combining a sociological approach to literature with detailed close readings, Yasmine Ramadan explores the spatial representations that embodied this shift within the Egyptian literary scene and the disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel. This study provides a robust examination of the emergence and establishment of some of the most significant writers in modern Egyptian literature, and their influence across six decades, while also tracing the social, economic, political and aesthetic changes that marked this period in Egypt's contemporary history.

Download or read book Poor written by Idris Ali and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intense and powerful story by one of Egypt?'s leading Nubian authors

Download or read book Blue Aubergine written by Al-Tahawy and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blue Aubergine tells the story of a young Egyptian woman, born in 1967, growing up in the wake of Egypt's defeat of that year, and maturing into womanhood against the social and political upheavals Egypt experienced during the final decades of the twentieth century. Physically and emotionally scarred by her parents and the events of her childhood, and incapable of relating to men, Nada, the 'Blue Aubergine,' fumbles through a series of dark and unsettling adventures, resorting first to full Islamic dress with niqab and gloves and then throwing it all off for the flowing hair and tight clothes of an emancipated young graduate student, in an ever more desperate and ultimately failed search for tenderness and affection. A frank assessment of the damage society wreaks by foisting unwise claustrophobic values on its children, this richly woven text shifts unpredictably through time and space like a sojourn in dream time. A mixed crowd of aunts and teachers, classmates and fellow students, Marxists and Islamicists are there to people the Blue Aubergine's bewildering journey to the knowledge that the maintenance of chastity and innocence and her naïve determination to cling to the threads of silk and lace that bind her to her past bring only misery and isolation.

Download or read book Murder in the Tower of Happiness written by M. M. Tawfik and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When the first armchair smashed into the asphalt, Sergeant Ashmouni was at his usual spot on the median of the Nile Corniche, trapped by the road's twin currents turbulently flowing forth to Maadi and back to Old Cairo. He was wiping the sweat away from his eyes with his worn out sleeve and in the process adding a new stain to his white traffic-police uniform when surprise from the thunderous impact catapulted him into the fast lane of the side of the road closest to the Nile." Thus opens this fast-paced city thriller laced with dry humor that takes us inside Borg al-Saada 'Tower of Happiness,' one of the luxury high-rises planted like alien bodies amid the fields along the Nile south of Cairo and inside the sordid lives and lavish lifestyles of its superrich and famous denizens. The naked, strangled body of Ahlam, a beautiful young actress, is discovered in one of the elevators, and as the police investigation gets under way, we meet many of the tower's strange characters: the owner's agent, Kasib Bey, overweight, toupeed, and decked in gold chains; wealthy contractor Abd al-Tawab Mabruk Basha (Tutu Basha to his friends), insomniac since Ahlam's murder; Abd al-Malak, a psychic with a Ph.D. in genetic engineering from MIT; Farah, his erstwhile sweetheart, who has become one of the very candy dolls she used to scorn; belly-dancer Lula Hamdi, who would be able to see Timbuktu if she stood on top of a pile of all her money; Madame Esmeralda, the society lady from Chile; and the homely Dr. Mahgub, somewhat less well off than his neighbors. And of course there is Antar the naughty boy who roams the tower, enters apartments, and overhears conversations, unsettling and exposing the decadent occupants and their relationships.

Download or read book The Lamp of Umm Hashim and other stories written by and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of several works in Arabic to deal with the way in which an individual tries to come to terms with two divergent cultures Together with such figures as the scholar Taha Hussein, the playwright Tawfik al-Hakim, the short story writer Mahmoud Teymour and--of course--Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Hakki belongs to that distinguished band of early writers who, midway through the last century, under the influence of Western literature, began to practice genres of creative writing that were new to the traditions of classical Arabic. In the first story in this volume, the very short ''Story in the Form of a Petition, '' Yahya Hakki demonstrates his ease with gentle humor, a form rare in Arabic writing. In the following two stories, ''Mother of the Destitute'' and ''A Story from Prison, '' he describes with typical sympathy individuals who, less privileged than others, somehow manage to scrape through life's hardships. The latter story deals with the people of Upper Egypt, for whom the writer had a special understanding and affection. It is, however, for the title story (in fact, more of a novella) of this collection that the writer is best known. Recounting the difficulties faced by a young man who is sent to England to study medicine and who then returns to Egypt to pit his new ideals against tradition, ''The Lamp of Umm Hashim'' was the first of several works in Arabic to deal with the way in which an individual tries to come to terms with two divergent cultures.

Download or read book Hunger written by Muḥammad al- Bisāṭī and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Episodic in form, this novel deals with a family--Zaghloul the layabout father, Sakeena the long-suffering wife, and two young boys. The central theme of the book is hunger: the hunger of not knowing where one's next meal is coming from, and the universal hunger for sex and love. Sakeena's life revolves round trying to provide her family with the necessary daily loaves of bread that will stave off starvation. Labor-shy Zaghloul works on and off at one of the village's cafés, but prefers to spend his time listening in on conversations about subjects such as politics.