Dust: Egypt’s Forgotten Architecture by Xenia Nikolskaya (AUC Press, 2022).
“Shot in natural light, empty and devoid of people, her images capture the almost eerie desolation. . . . What attracts us in the photos is the tension between the beautiful and the broken, where the passage of time becomes visible; and the patina, which gives man-made things an air of the organic.”—Dixikon
The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt, 641–1517 The Popes of Egypt, Volume 2 by Mark N. Swanson (AUC Press, 2022).
“The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt is a masterfully written book and a fresh, delightful read. It deeply enriches the scholarship on medieval Copts. Paying attention to political, economic, social, and religious factors, Swanson masterfully demonstrates the plurality of developments and shifts within the Coptic community during these ten centuries and shatters any conception of medieval Copts as a monolith. It is a valuable resource for scholars, graduate students, and non-academics interested in the history, religion, and theology of medieval Middle Eastern Christians, medieval Christian-Muslim relations, and medieval Egyptian history.”—Monica Mitri, Reading Religion
City of Love and Ashes: A Novel by Yusuf Idris, translated by R. Neil Hewison (Hoopoe, 2002).
“Yusuf Idris trained to be a doctor but found himself drawn to storytelling as a means of making sense of the era through which he was living: the sun setting on British occupation, the dawn of Nasser’s regime, a country headed at velocity into the modern 20th century. . . .[A] seminal 1956 novel.”—Financial Times
A Nose and Three Eyes: A Novel by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, translated by Jonathan Smolin (Hoopoe, 2024).
“The novel is filled with the yearning and poor choices of young love under oppressive social expectations, where the risks taken by men are paid for by the women in their lives. The translation by Jonathan Smolin is propulsive and flowing. Spanning the personal and the political, moving from Cairo to Suez to Beirut, this is an epic and enthralling romantic novel.”—The Irish Times
Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-to-Five Emergency by Melissa Gatter (AUC Press, 2023).
“Students of humanitarianism, refugee studies, the Middle East, and cultural anthropology will benefit from the ethnography’s eclectic but focused examination of refugee temporality in the encamped borderlands of Jordan . . . . Through her deft interplay between anthropological concepts of temporality and bureaucracy, Melissa Gatter offers readers a nuanced, creative, and widely adaptable approach to thinking about experiences of time within totalizing institutions.”—Malay Firoz, Middle East Journal
