Download or read book The Harafish written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz is perhaps the best-known living Arab writer. His books have had great success in this country, particularly The Cairo Trilogy. Fans of the famed trilogy will be delighted with The Harafish, an epic novel that chronicles the dramatic history of the al-Nagi family -- a family that moves, over many generations, from the height of power and glory to the depths of decadence and decay. The Harafish begins with the tale of Ashur al-Nagi, a man who grows from humble beginnings to become a great leader, a legend among his people. Generation after generation, however, Ashur's descendants grow further from his legendary example. They lose touch with their origins as they amass and then squander large fortunes, marry prostitutes when they marry at all, and develop rivalries that end in death. The community's upper class keeps a watchful eye on the descendants of al-Nagi for fear of losing their privileges, but they find no threat of another such as Ashur. Not, that is, until the al-Nagi who, like his noble ancestor, finds his power once again from among The Harafish, or the common people. Through the strength of their numbers and their passion, the glory of the name of al-Nagi is restored. "Of all [Mahfouz's] experiments in recent decades, this is the one which owes least to western inspiration and is probably the most successful. The Harafish, fluently translated by Catherine Cobham, makes accessible and engrossing reading." -- The Washington Post Book World.
Download or read book Midaq Alley written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Miramar written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Quarter written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet the people of Cairo's Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late to love; and Boss Saqr who stashes his money above the bath. A neighbourhood of demons, dancing and sweet halva, the quarter keeps quiet vigil over the secrets of all who live there. This collection by pre-eminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz was recently discovered among his old papers. Found with a slip of paper titled 'for publishing 1994', they are published here for the first time. Resplendent with Mahfouz's delicate and poignant observations of everyday happenings, these lively stories take the reader deep into the beating heart of Cairo.
Download or read book The Coffeehouse written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahfouz's last novel, an evocative depiction of life in Egypt in the twentieth century as told through the lives of a group of friends, is now available in paperback for the first time On a school playground in the stylish Cairo suburb of Abbasiya, five young boys become friends for life, making a nearby café, Qushtumur, their favorite gathering spot forever. One is the narrator, who, looking back in his old age on their seven decades together, makes the other four the heroes of his tale, a Proustian, and classically Mahfouzian, quest in search of lost time and the memory of a much-changed place. In a seamless stream of personal triumphs and tragedies, their lives play out against the backdrop of two world wars, the 1952 Free Officers coup, the defeat of 1967 and the redemption of 1973, the assassination of a president, and the simmering uncertainties of the transitional 1980s. But as their nation grows and their neighborhood turns from the green, villa-studded paradise of their youth to a dense urban desert of looming towers, they still find refuge in the one enduring landmark in their ever-fading world: the humble coffeehouse called Qushtumur. The Coffeehouse is a powerful and timeless novel of loss and memory from one of Egypt's most celebrated literary masters.
Download or read book Akhenaten written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.
Download or read book The Time and the Place written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Daivies, these stories have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz's novels: The denizens of the dark, narrow alleyways of Cairo, who struggle to survive the poverty; melancholy ruminations on death; experiments with the supernatural; and witty excursions into Cairene middle-class life.
Download or read book The Search written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Day the Leader Was Killed written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Sugar Street written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master storyteller Naguib Mahfouz crowns his best-selling Cairo Trilogy with this final chronicle of the Abdal-Jawad clan, climaxing the story begun in Palace Walk and continued in Palace Of Desire.
Download or read book Death in Spring written by Mercè Rodoreda and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merce Rodoreda depicts the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town-burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood-through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate.
Download or read book Autumn Quail written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book In the Time of Love written by محفوظ، نجيب، and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Nobel laureates most intriguing novels, translated for the first time into English.
Download or read book Cairo Modern written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Naguib Mahfouz's suspenseful novel a bitter and ambitious nihilist, a beautiful and impoverished student, and a corrupt official engage in a doomed ménage à trois. Cairo of the 1930s is a place of vast social and economic inequities. It is also a time of change, when the universities have just opened to women and heady new philosophies imported from Europe are stirring up debates among the young. Mahgub is a fiercely proud student who is determined to keep both his poverty and his lack of principles secret from his idealistic friends. When he finds that there are no jobs for those without connections, out of desperation he agrees to participate in an elaborate deception. But what begins as a mere strategy for survival soon becomes much more for both Mahgub and his partner in crime, an equally desperate young woman named Ihsan. As they make their way through Cairo's lavish high society their precarious charade begins to unravel and the terrible price of Mahgub's Faustian bargain becomes clear. Translated by William M. Hutchins
Download or read book The Journey of Ibn Fattouma written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative and dreamy parable, a young man disillusioned by the corruption of his homeland sets out on a quest to find Gebel, the land of perfection, from which no one has ever returned. On his way, Ibn Fattouma passes through a series of very different lands--realms where the moon is worshipped, where marriage does not exist, where kings are treated like gods, and where freedom, toleration, and justice are alternately held as the highest goods. All of these places, however, are inevitably marred by the specter of war, and Ibn Fattouma finds himself continually driven onward, ever seeking. Like the protagonists of A Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels, Naguib Mahfouz's hero travels not through any recognizable historical landscape, but through timeless aspects of human possibility.
Download or read book The Magnificent Conman of Cairo written by Adel Kamel and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available in English for the first time, this rediscovered classic which Naguib Mahfouz called “exceptional," tells a story of fathers and sons, scoundrels and the innocent, set in 1930s Cairo Khaled, the spoiled idle son of a pasha, meets Mallim, carpenter’s apprentice and son of a scoundrel, when he comes to fix a broken window. In the course of his work, Mallim stumbles across a stash of money and dutifully hands it in. Khaled cooks up an overly elaborate plot to see that his dastardly father pays Mallim his due, but the plot backfires and Mallim is thrown in jail. Khaled’s guilt over Mallim’s misfortune, made worse by his ridiculous attempts to defend him, result in a decisive moment: he breaks ties with his cruel and tyrannical father, seeking to leave behind the upper-class lifestyle he finds so suffocating. They meet again years later, when Mallim has been released from prison and given up on earning an honest living. Khaled gets caught up in Mallim’s latest scam and is drawn into joining his cadre of eccentrics and failed artists living in a derelict Mamluk citadel. With a sharp satirical voice Adel Kamal’s masterful novel is filled with compelling drama, vivid characters, and subtle humor.
Download or read book The Beggar written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complex tale of alienation and despair. Unable to achieve psychological renewal in the aftermath of Nasser's revolution, a man sacrifices his work and family to a series of illicit love affairs that intensify his feelings of estrangement. A passionate outcry against irrelevance.
