Said al-Kafrawi was born and brought up in a village in the Egyptian Delta. He has published six collections of short stories. Although individual stories have been published in various languages, this is the first volume of his work to appear in translation. Denys Johnson-Davies has published over twenty-five volumes of short stories, novels, poetry, and drama from modern Arabic literature. He has been described by Edward Said as “the leading Arabic–English translator of our time.”