You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Waguih Ghali was raised in Cairo but spent much of his adult life studying and working in Europe. In Beer in the Snooker Club, Ghali chronicles the lives of Cairo's upper crust who, after the fall of King Farouk, are thoroughly unprepared to change its neo-feudal ways. Beer in the Snooker Club was the only book written by Ghali before his suicide in 1968. "Ghali's novel reproduces a cultural state of shock with great accuracy and great humor."–James Marcus of The Nation
Interview with Diana Athill / by Deborah Starr -- The diaries of Waguih Ghali. Going mad ; All my resolutions ; London ; Yesterday spent a quiet evening at home ; It is, I suppose, time to reckon up again
A muscular novel about boxers in small town California in the 50s: an American classic Stockton, California: a town of dark bars and lunchrooms, cheap hotels and farm labourers scratching a living. When two men meet in the Lido Gym - the ex-boxer Billy Tully and the novice Ernie Munger - their brief sparring session sets a fateful story in motion, initiating young Munger into the "company of men" and luring Tully back into training. Fat City is a vivid novel of defiance and struggle, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. This acclaimed American classic tells of their anxieties and hopes, their loves and losses, and the ephemera...
In 1968 Egyptian novelist and political exile Waguih Ghali committed suicide in the London flat of his editor, friend, and sometime lover, Diana Athill. Ghali left behind six notebooks of diaries that for decades were largely inaccessible to the public. The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian in the Swinging Sixties, in two volumes, is the first publication of its kind of the journals, casting fascinating light on a likable and highly enigmatic literary personality. Waguih Ghali (1930?–69), author of the acclaimed novel Beer in the Snooker Club, was a libertine, sponger, and manic depressive, but also an extraordinary writer, a pacifist, and a savvy political commentator. Covering the las...
A novel of the Arab Spring A Middle-Eastern capital caught in the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. A day in the life of a young man disillusioned with both East and West and struggling to find a place for himself in a society ruled by hypocrisy and contradictions. Rasa works as an interpreter for Western journalists by day and divides his nights between the Guapa, an underground nightclub where the city’s clandestine LGBT community congregates, and his secret lover Taymour. Every night Taymour sneaks into the house Rasa shares with his overbearing grandmother, the woman who raised him. When she finds them in bed together on the eve of Taymour’s wedding day, all hell breaks loose. T...
None
That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential Arabic novels. Composed in the wake of a five-year prison sentence, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city. That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential novels written in Arabic since WWII. Composed after a five-year term in prison, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city. Living under house arrest, he tries to write of his tortuous experience, but instead smokes, spies on th...
Politicising World Literature: Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public engages with postcolonial and world literature approaches to examine the worldly imaginary of the novel genre and assert the political imperative to teaching world literature. How does canonising world literature relate to societal, political or academic reform? Alternating between close reading of texts and literary history, this monograph studies a corpus of novels and travelogues in English, Arabic, French, Czech and Italian to historicise Egypt’s literary relations with different parts of the world in both the modern period and the pre-modern period. In this rigorous study, May Hawas argues that protagonists, particularly in times of political crises, locate themselves as individuals with communal or political affiliations that supersede, if not actually resist, national affiliations.
The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic. Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.
Opening up the field of diasporic Anglo-Arab literature to critical debate, this companion spans from the first Arab novel in 1911 to the resurgence of the Anglo-Arabic novel in the last 20 years. There are chapters on authors such as Ameen Rihani, Ahdaf