A delightful, deeply funny novel about the triumph of the perfect prankster — an elegant gentleman pickpocket in Cairo.His eyes “shine with a glimmer of perpetual amusement”; his sartorial taste is impeccable; Ossama is “a thief, not a legitimated thief, such as a minister, banker, or real-estate developer; he is a modest thief.” He knows “that by dressing with the same elegance as the licensed robbers of the people, he could elude the mistrustful gaze of the polic...

Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery’s wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the most materially impoverished life.Chief among Cossery’s proud beggars is Gohar, a former professor turned whorehouse accountant, hashish aficionado, and street philosopher. Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small cote...

A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile"Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery’s biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle — slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another savagely defends the household from women. Serag, th...

Who are the jokers?The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set.The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose.And the jokers are Karim, Omar, Heykal, Urfy, and their f...

Friendly Fire, the first collection of short stories from Alaa Al Aswany, acclaimed author of Chicago and The Yacoubian Building, deftly explores the lives of contemporary Egyptians. Here are stories of generational conflict, corruption, repression, infidelity, and the dangerous clashing of western and Arab ideals, all beautifully rendered by Al Aswany, a true modern master and one of Egypt's "most exciting literary exports" ( Minneapolis Star Tribune).

**WINNER OF THE NEW YORKER BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION • From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt."Engrossing. . . . [Said has] an almost ...

Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz draws on his homeland’s rich engagement with the afterlife–and his own near-death experience at the hands of a would-be assassin–in these newly translated, brilliantly mysterious stories of the supernatural.Among those who haunt these tales are the ghosts of Akhenaten, Woodrow Wilson, and Gamal Abd al-Nasser, who endure a strange system of earthly probation in the hope of gaining entry to the fabled Seventh Heaven; a teenager drawn into the se...

"An enigmatic fable in the tradition of 'The Thousand and One Nights.' " —Anderson Tepper, New York Times Book ReviewHassan, a storyteller, has gathered listeners in Marrakesh's fabled Jemaa el Fna to perform his annual re-creation of the night on which two foreigners mysteriously disappeared from the square. But as his audience offers contradicting testimonies, and details transform or dissolve in the haze of memory, the couple takes on an air as enigmati...

A literary discovery: an uproarious tragicomedy of modernization, in its first-ever English translationPerhaps the greatest Turkish novel of the twentieth century, being discovered around the world only now, more than fifty years after its first publication, The Time Regulation Institute is an antic, freewheeling send-up of the modern bureaucratic state.At its center is Hayri Irdal, an infectiously charming antihero who becomes entangled with an ec...

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 ...

An opium addict spirals into madness after losing a mysterious lover in this "extraordinary work" of modern Persian literature ( The Times Literary Supplement, UK).Sadegh Hedayat was Iran's most renowned modern fiction writer, and his spine-tingling novel The Blind Owl is considered his seminal work. A classic of modern Iranian literature, this edition is presented to contemporary audiences with a new introduction by Porochista Khakpour, one of th...

The Nobel Prize winner and one of today's most prominent contemporary Turkish writers delivers a novel that is a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, a brilliant symposium on the power of art, and a “modern classic … rich and essential” (Los Angeles Times Book Review)—set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul.The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book ...