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First Published in 2004. Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most important Arabic fiction writers of this century. Born in 1911, his long and prolific writing career represents the evolution of a novel genre in Arabic literature. His books are a record of the tragic tensions attendant on a nations's quest for freedom and modernity. In 1988 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book provides a comprehensive study of Mahfouz's achievement. Rasheed El-Enany presents a systemic evaluation of the author's life and environment; local and foreign influences on him; elements of his thought and technique and the evolution of his craft. While each work is discussed individually, emphasis is laid throu...
Arabic fiction.
Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) is the only Arab writer to have been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. In its citation for the Nobel prize, the Swedish Academy of Letters noted “through works rich in nuance—now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous— has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind.†The author of thirty-five novels, fifteen collections of short stories, twenty-five film screenplays, numerous critical works, and in his later years over five hundred short fictions based on his dreams (partly published as The Dreams and Dreams of Departure by the AUC Press in 2004 and 2007), he has been hugely influential on several generations of Arab writers, and his books are now read in more than forty languages around the world. In this first biography of Naguib Mahfouz in English, Rasheed El-Enany looks at the life of the man and the work of the writer, and assesses the oeuvre and legacy of a towering figure in the Egyptian and Arab literary world who was able to reach far beyond his own linguistic and cultural boundaries to an admiring readership across the globe.
A novel about an Egyptian man who keeps his wife as a prisoner in her own home.
"This volume, published on the occasion of the Nobel laureate's 90th birthday, brings together a selection of the more personal, reflective pieces that have appeared over the past seven years. They reveal a writer concerned as always with the human condition, with his own thought processes, and with the craft of writing, offering rare insights into the way a great writer thinks and works. The range and quality of writing is even more remarkable when one remembers that since a nearly fatal knife attack in 1994, the injuries Mahfouz sustained, combined with his failing eyesight, have made it almost impossible for him to write. But as a man who has devoted his life to the written word, Mahfouz now prepares his weekly articles through conversations with his friend Mohamed Salmawy, who has selected and gathered the pieces in this collection.
A carefully curated selection of the most important works of Egypt's Nobel literature laureate in a single volume 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," 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.
In July 2006, at the age of 94, Naguib Mahfouz, the grand old man of Egyptian novels and winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1988, was admitted to hospital after an apparently minor fall sustained in his home in Cairo. Among the few friends allowed regular visits to Mahfouz's hospital bedside was the writer Mohamed Salmawy, former colleague at Al-Ahram newspaper and, following the failed assassination attempt in 1994 when Mahfouz had lost the full use of his right hand, an assistant in recording Mahfouz's late creative output. The Last Station, Mohamed Salmawy's intimate journal of Naguib Mahfouz's final weeks, sparkles with reminiscences of joyful times together and significant events from the great writer's life. Even for those less familiar with the writings of Naguib Mahfouz, it portrays the closeness of two writers from different generations and celebrates the life of an incomparable artist.
At the center of Khufu’s Wisdom, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s majestic first novel, is the legendary Fourth Dynasty monarch Khufu (Cheops), for whom the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. When a seer prophesies the end of Khufu’s dynasty and the ascension to the throne of Djedefra, son of the High Priest of Ra, the pharaoh must battle to preserve his legacy against the will of the Fates. But in the face of the inexorable attraction between Djedefra and Princess Meresankh, Khufu’s beautiful daughter, Khufu must consider not only his personal ambition and the opposing decree of the heavens, but also how the wisdom he prides himself on as a ruler will guide him in determining the fate of his daughter’s heart. Translated by Raymond Stock
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...