Download or read book Karnak Cafe written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation by the secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion, fear, and betrayal. At a Cairo café in the 1960s, a legendary former belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family of regulars, including a group of idealistic university students. One day, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the students disappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail's beautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, they are apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. It is only years later, after their lives have been further shattered, that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrific stories and learns how the government used them against one another. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself enters the Café and sits among his former victims, claiming a right to join their society of the disillusioned. Now translated into English for the first time, Naguib Mahfouz's tale of the insidious effects of government-sanctioned torture and the suspension of rights and freedoms in a time of crisis is shockingly contemporary.
Download or read book The Egyptian Coffeehouse written by Dalia Mostafa and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The coffeehouse is a microcosm of the larger Egyptian society with its history of multiculturalism and great diversity. It is not only a social space which was created and shaped by the people over decades in their streets, neighbourhoods and cities, but it also occupies a sphere in the popular imagination full of stories, memories and social networks. Despite the coffeehouse's cultural centrality and socio-political importance in Egypt, academic research and publications on its significance remain sparse. This volume aims to fill this gap by presenting, for the first time in English, a full study analysing the importance of the coffeehouse as an urban phenomenon, with its cultural, historical, economic and political significance in contemporary Egyptian society. The volume shows how historically the coffeehouse has always played a key role as a commercial enterprise; and culturally, as a place for rich literary and artistic production which has multi-layered representations in Egyptian novels, cinema and popular music, amongst other genres. Economically, the coffeehouse has been vital for accessing job opportunities, especially for informal workers; in addition to having played a crucial role in political mobilisation during decisive historical events, as well as in recent years during the 2011 revolution and its aftermath. Through extended interviews with six residents in Cairo, the authors further examine the role and influence of the coffeehouse as a significant feature of contemporary Egyptian life and urban landscape.
Download or read book Committed to Disillusion written by David Fred DiMeo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a writer help to bring about a more just society? This question was at the heart of the movement of al-adab al-multazim, or committed literature, which claimed to dominate Arab writing in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, however, leading Egyptian writers had retreated into disillusionment, producing agonized works that challenged the key assumptions of socially engaged writing. Rather than a rejection of the idea, however, these works offered reinterpretation of committed writing that helped set the stage for activist writers of the present. David DiMeo focuses on the work of three leading writers whose socially committed fiction was adapted to the disenchantment and discontent of the late twentieth century: Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Despite their disappointments with the direction of Egyptian society in the decades following the 1952 revolution, they kept the spirit of committed literature alive through a deeply introspective examination of the relationship between the writer, the public, and political power. Reaching back to the roots of this literary movement, DiMeo examines the development of committed literature from its European antecedents to its peak of influence in the 1950s, and contrasts the committed works with those of disillusionment that followed. Committed to Disillusion is vital reading for scholars and students of Arabic literature and the modern history and politics of the Middle East.
Download or read book Caf Karnak written by Naguib Mahfuz and published by Planeta Publishing. This book was released on 2000-12-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: «Me gustó aquel sitio por su excelente café, el agua pura, las tazas y los vasos limpios, la dulzura de Qaránfula, la grave dignidad de los ancianos, la vitalidad de los jóvenes y la belleza de la chica.»Así describe el narrador (acaso el mismo autor) el ambiente y los personajes que frecuentan el Café Karnak, cálido punto de unión entre el pasado y el presente. Cuandno sin previo aviso tres jóvenes dejan de acudir al café, Qaránfula, su dueña, una bella mujer madura que fue bailarina, empieza a investigar. Descubrirá sus historias entrelazadas y la cara más dura de la revolución. Esta novela, situada en el Egipto de los años 70, nos traslada con sensibilidad al corazón de un cambio histórico y sus dolorosas contradicciones.
Download or read book Committed to Disillusion written by David DiMeo and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a writer help to bring about a more just society? This question was at the heart of the movement of al-adab al-multazim, or committed literature, which claimed to dominate Arab writing in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, however, leading Egyptian writers had retreated into disillusionment, producing agonized works that challenged the key assumptions of socially engaged writing. Rather than a rejection of the idea, however, these works offered reinterpretation of committed writing that helped set the stage for activist writers of the present. David DiMeo focuses on the work of three leading writers whose socially committed fiction was adapted to the disenchantment and discontent of the late twentieth century: Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Despite their disappointments with the direction of Egyptian society in the decades following the 1952 revolution, they kept the spirit of committed literature alive through a deeply introspective examination of the relationship between the writer, the public, and political power. Reaching back to the roots of this literary movement, DiMeo examines the development of committed literature from its European antecedents to its peak of influence in the 1950s, and contrasts the committed works with those of disillusionment that followed. Committed to Disillusion is vital reading for scholars and students of Arabic literature and the modern history and politics of the Middle East.
Download or read book Conscience of the Nation written by Richard Jacquemond and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artfully combining social and literary history, this unique study explores the dual loyalties of contemporary Egyptian authors from the 1952 Revolution to the present day. Egypt's writers have long had an elevated idea of their social mission, considering themselves 'the conscience of the nation.' At the same time, modern Egyptian writers work under the liberal conception of the writer borrowed from the European model. As a result, each Egyptian writer treads the tightrope between authority and freedom, social commitment and artistic license, loyalty to the state and to personal expression, in an ongoing quest for an elusive literary ideal. With these fundamentals in mind, Conscience of the Nation examines Egyptian literary production over the past fifty years, surveying works by established writers, as well as those of dozens of other authors who are celebrated in Egypt but whose writings are largely unknown to the foreign reader. Novelists and poets, scriptwriters and playwrights, critics and journalists all have battled with and tried to resolve the tensions inherent in the conflicting forces of self and society.
Download or read book Melancholy Acts written by Nouri Gana and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of such intellectuals as Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, from within the Arab world, as well as such non-Arab thinkers as Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek. Melancholy Acts charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, as they swerve between symptom and critique, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History written by Beth Baron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this Oxford Handbook rethink the modern history of one of the most important and influential countries in the Middle East--Egypt. For a country and region so often understood in terms of religion and violence, this work explores environmental, medical, legal, cultural, and political histories. It gives readers an excellent view of the current debates in Egyptian history.
Download or read book The Egyptian Military in Popular Culture written by Dalia Said Mostafa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-23 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a key question through the lens of popular culture: Why did the Egyptian people opt to elect in June 2014 a new president (Abdel Fattah al-Sisi), who hails from the military establishment, after toppling a previous military dictator (Hosni Mubarak) with the breakout of the 25 January 2011 Revolution? In order to dissect this question, the author considers the complexity of the relationship between the Egyptian people and their national army, and how popular cultural products play a pivotal role in reinforcing or subverting this relationship. The author takes the reader on a ‘journey’ through crucial historical and political events in Egypt whilst focusing on multi-layered representations of the ‘military figure’ (the military leader, the heroic soldier, the freedom fighter, the conscript, the martyred soldier, and the Intelligence officer) in a wide range of popular works in literature, film, song, TV drama series, and graffiti art. Mostafa argues that the realm of popular culture in Egypt serves as the ‘blood veins’ which feed the nation’s perception of its Armed Forces.
Download or read book Naguib Mahfouz written by Rasheed El-Enany and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book The Mahfouz Dialogs written by Jamāl Ghīṭānī and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mahfouz Dialogs records the memories, views, and jokes of Naguib Mahfouz on subjects ranging from politics to the relationship between his novels and his life, as delivered to intimate friends at a series of informal meetings stretching out over almost half a century. Mahfouz was a pivotal figure not only in world literature (through being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win a mass audience), but also in his own society, where he vastly enhanced the image of the writer in the eyes of the public and encapsulated--as the victim of a savage attack on his life by an Islamist in 1994--the struggle between pluralism, tolerance, and secularism on the one hand and extremist Islam. Moderated by Gamal al-Ghitani, a writer of a younger generation who shared a common background with Mahfouz (al-Ghitani also grew up in medieval Cairo) and felt a vast personal empathy for the writer despite their sometimes different views, these exchanges throw new light on Mahfouz's life, the creation of his novels, and literary Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Dreams written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his final years, Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz distilled his storyteller's art to its most essential level. Written with the compression and power of dreams, these poetic vignettes, originally collected in two books, The Dreams and Dreams of Departure, here combined in one volume for the first time. These stories telescope epic tales into tersely haunting miniatures. A man finds his neighborhood has turned into a circus, but his joy turns to anger when he cannot escape it. An obscure writer finally achieves fame-through the epitaph on his grave. A group of friends telling jokes in an alley face the murderous revenge of an ancient Egyptian queen. Figures from Mahfouz's past-women he loved, men who inspired him, even fictional characters from his own novels-float through tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in sleep. Translated by Raymond Stock
Download or read book The Final Hour written by Najīb Maḥfūẓ and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hamid Burhan, a retired government employee, and his loyal wife Saniya have built themselves a home in the quiet southern suburb of Helwan, where they raise their son and two daughters, expecting life to remain as blessed as it was in the photograph of the happy family at a picnic in a Nileside park in the early 1930s. Events in the wider world impinge wars, revolution, peace with Israel while Saniya and the old house in Helwan remain the bedrock of the family's values. But everyone else is buffeted in one way or another by the tumultuous processes of change in Egyptian politics and society. In this compact novel written in 1982, Naguib Mahfouz again uses a family saga, as he did in his Cairo Trilogy, to reflect on the processes of enormous social transformation that Egypt underwent in the space of a few generations in the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Arabic Novel written by Roger Allen and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition includes new material on the Arabic novel up to 1993. It is a survey of the Arabic novel and its development from its beginnings in the 19th century until today. It traces the origin, early cultivation and the mature period after World War II of the Arabic novel.
Download or read book The Essential Naguib Mahfouz written by and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of the most important works of Egypt's Nobel literature laureate. Naguib Mahfouz, the first and only writer of Arabic to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature, wrote prolifically from the 1930s until shortly before his death in 2006, in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, a regular weekly newspaper column, and in later life his intensely brief and evocative Dreams. His Cairo Trilogy achieved the status of a world classic, and the Swedish Academy of Letters in awarding him the 1988 Nobel prize for literature noted that Mahfouz "through works rich in nuance-now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous-has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind." Here Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," and the first to translate Naguib Mahfouz into English, makes an essential selection of short stories and extracts from novels and other writings, to present a cross-section through time of the very best of the work of Egypt's Nobel literature laureate.
Download or read book A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature written by David Tresilian and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Arabic literature remains little known and poorly understood despite growing curiosity among European readers. This brief introduction offers a unique overview, focusing on developments over the last fifty years. It provides a guide to the literary landscape, indicating the major landmarks in the shape of authors, ideas and debates. The picture that emerges shows that the literature of the modern Arab world, Europe's closest neighbour, is not so far from us as we are sometimes encouraged to think. A timely contribution to the dialogue between East and West, bringing modern Arabic literature into the mainstream for English-speaking readers. 'Tresilian's book is not only informative about its subject but also provides thought-provoking messages to the general reader.' -- Denys Johnson Davies Banipal
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture written by Dwight F. Reynolds and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dwight F. Reynolds brings together a collection of essays by leading international scholars to provide a comprehensive and accessible survey of modern Arab culture, from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The chapters survey key issues necessary to any understanding of the modern Arab World: the role of the various forms of the Arabic language in modern culture and identity; the remarkable intellectual transformation undergone during the 'Nahda' or 'Arab Renaissance' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the significant role played by ethnic and religious minorities, and the role of law and constitutions. Other chapters on poetry, narrative, theatre, cinema and television, art, architecture, humour, folklore, and food offer fresh perspectives and correct negative stereotypes that emerge from viewing Arab culture primarily through the lens of politics, terrorism, religion, and economics.
