This is the story of one man and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Isa al-Dabbagh is a senior civil servant in the Egyptian government who loses his job, and his fiancee, when the Purge Committees of the Revolution bring his venal past to light. His personal relationships reflect the resulting internal conflict he suffers between mind and heart, between intellectual acceptance of the Revolution and the basic emotional instincts that hold him back.
Autumn Quail
Naguib Mahfouz
Translated byRoger Allen
Revised by
John Rodenbeck
172 pp.
12.5X19.5cm
ISBN 9789774241079
For sale only in the Middle East
$14.95
Also available by this author
Before the Throne
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
In this extraordinary drama-in-dialogue, Naguib Mahfouz reveals his love for all of Egypt’s extensive history—and his deep knowledge of it. In Before the Throne, he summons nearly sixty of Egypt’s rulers to the afterlife Court of Osiris, from a king who unified Egypt for the first time, around 3000 BC, to a president assassinated by religious extremists in 1981. He includes names as familiar as the pharaoh Ramesses II and as obscure as the medieval vizier Qaraqush. Defending their behavior before the divine tribunal, those who acted for the nation’s good are honored with immortality, but those who failed to protect it leave the gilded hall of eternal justice with a very different verdict. Full of Mahfouz’s unique insight into his country’s timeless qualities, this controversial work skillfully traces five thousand years of Egypt’s past as it flows into the present, through the mind of its most acclaimed author.
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1 November 2009
Hardbound
128 pp.12.5X20cm
$22.95
Heart of the Night
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byAida A. Bamia
Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi, the main character in this most recently translated Mahfouz novel, is guided by his motto, “let life be filled with holy madness to the last breath.” He narrates his life story to a friend during one long night in a café in old Cairo. Through a series of bad decisions, he has lost everything: his family, his position in society, and his fortune. A man driven by his passions, he married a beautiful Bedouin nomad for love, and as a consequence pays a punishingly high price. From a life of comfort with a promising future guaranteed by his wealthy grandfather, he descends to the spartan life of a pauper, after being disinherited. Jaafar faces his tribulations with surprising stoicism and hope, sustained by his strong convictions, his spirituality, his sense of mission, and his deep desire to bring social justice to his people.
...read more
1 February 2011
Hardbound
112 pp.12.5X20cm
$19.95
Khufu’s Wisdom
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
Pharaoh Khufu is battling the Fates. At stake is the inheritance of Egypt’s throne, the proud but tender heart of Khufu’s beautiful daughter Princess Meresankh, and Khufu’s legacy as a sage, not savage, ruler. As the tale begins, Khufu is bored in his great palace at Memphis. To entertain him, his architect Mirabu expounds on the mighty masterwork he has so far spent ten years building, with little yet showing above ground—what will become the Great Pyramid of Giza. Mirabu and the clever vizier Hemiunu tempt him with other amusements as well—but to no avail. Then one of the king’s sons fetches a magician with the power to predict the future. The sorcerer says that Khufu’s own offspring will not inherit Egypt’s throne after him, but that it will fall instead to a son born that very morning to the High Priest of Ra. Furious, Khufu and his crown prince, the ruthless Khafra, set out to change the decree of the Fates—which fight back in the form of Djedefra, the boy at the center of the prophecy, and his heart’s desire, Princess Meresankh. Yet will the unsuspecting Khufu survive the intrigue around him—not only to finish his long-awaited book of wisdom, but to become truly wise?
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15 January 2004
Hardbound
206 pp.15X23cm
$22.95
Life’s Wisdom
from the Works of the Nobel Laureate
Naguib MahfouzEdited by Aleya Serour
With a writing career spanning some seventy years, Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most recognized writers in the world. His study of philosophy at what is now Cairo University greatly influenced his works, as did his wide readings and his work in the government and in the Cinema Organization. Life’s Wisdom is a unique collection of quotations selected from the great author’s works, offering philosophical insights on themes such as childhood, youth, love, marriage, war, freedom, death, the supernatural, the afterlife, the soul, immortality, and many other subjects that take us through life’s journey. Naguib Mahfouz’s works abound with words of wisdom. As Nadine Gordimer states in her foreword to his Echoes of an Autobiography: “The essence of a writer’s being is in the work, not the personality, though the world values things otherwise, and would rather see what the writer looks like on television than read where he or she really is to be found: in the writings.” In keeping with Gordimer’s comment, Mahfouz’s true nature can be found in his writing. The quotations included here offer a broad, yet profound, insight into the writer’s philosophy gained through a life’s journey of experience and writing.
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Hardbound
136 pp.12.5X20cm
$19.95
Love in the Rain
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byNancy Roberts
Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, Love in the Rain introduces us to an assortment of characters who, each in his or her own way, experience the effects of this calamitous event. The war and its casualties, as well as people’s foibles and the tragedies they create for themselves, raise existential questions that cannot easily be answered. In a frank, sensitive treatment of everything from patriotism to prostitution, homosexuality and lesbianism, Love in the Rain presents a struggle between “old” and “new” in the realm of moral values that leaves the future in doubt. Through the dilemmas and heartbreaks faced by his protagonists, Mahfouz exposes the hypocrisy of those who condemn any breach of sexual morality while turning a blind eye to violence, corruption, and oppression.
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1 April 2011
Hardbound
140 pp.12.5X20cm
$19.95
Midaq Alley
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Humphrey Davies
This much-loved Mahfouz masterpiece is a rich account of life in a back street in a poor quarter of medieval Cairo. While the novel focuses on a willful young woman whose ambition to escape the confines of the alley leads her into prostitution, a pageant of other vivid characters, from the café owner who likes boys to the man who creates maimed beggars and from the young man with the faithful heart to the rake and the pimp, fleshes out the picture of a society in crisis and transition. Though the novel is set during the Second World War, the characters’ alienation from the prevailing political system and the desire of many of them to escape the economic and social stagnation of the alley give the work an unexpectedly up-to-date flavor. Mahfouz presents his characters with wry humor and a relish for the contradictions and fallibilities innate in people everywhere (even the alley’s beloved spiritual mentor beats his wife). This new translation of one of the writer’s best known works has been undertaken to celebrate the centenary of his birth in 2011.
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15 December 2011
Hardbound
288 pp.15X23cm
$24.95
The Coffeehouse
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
On a school playground in the stylish Cairo suburb of Abbasiya, five young boys become friends for life, making a nearby café, Qushtumur, their favorite gathering spot forever. One is the narrator, who, looking back in his old age on their seven decades together, makes the other four the heroes of his tale, a Proustian (and classically Mahfouzian) quest in search of lost time and the memory of a much-changed place. In a seamless stream of personal triumphs and tragedies, their lives play out against the backdrop of two world wars, the 1952 Free Officers coup, the defeat of 1967 and the redemption of 1973, the assassination of a president, and the simmering uncertainties of the transitional 1980s. But as their nation grows and their neighborhood turns from the green, villa-studded paradise of their youth to a dense urban desert of looming towers, they still find refuge in the one enduring landmark in their ever-fading world: the humble coffeehouse called Qushtumur.
...read more
1 February 2011
Hardbound
208 pp.12.5X20cm
$19.95
The Wisdom of Naguib Mahfouz
from the Works of the Nobel Laureate
Naguib MahfouzEdited by Aleya Serour
With a writing career spanning some seventy years, Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most recognized writers in the world. His study of philosophy at what is now Cairo University greatly influenced his works, as did his wide readings and his work in the government and in the Cinema Organization. The Wisdom of Naguib Mahfouz, like the earlier Life’s Wisdom, is a unique collection of quotations selected from the great author’s works, offering philosophical insights on themes such as childhood, youth, love, marriage, war, freedom, death, the supernatural, the afterlife, the soul, immortality, and many other subjects that take us through life’s journey.
...read more
15 December 2011
Hardbound
128 pp.12.5X20cm
$19.95
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Children of the Alley
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byPeter Theroux
In this rich and intricate novel, Naguib Mahfouz guides us through the history of an alley whose denizens—some fearsome, most fearful, a few fearless—are all the descendants of one man, Gabalawi, who now keeps himself hidden away in the mansion at the top of the alley. From the supreme feudal lord who disowns one son for cruel pride and puts another to the test, to the savior of a succeeding generation, we observe the men and women of this quintessential Cairo neighborhood unwittingly reenacting the lives of their venerable forebears, telling through their rivalries, battles, love affairs, and miracles the spiritual history of mankind.
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Heart of the Night
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byAida A. Bamia
Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi, the main character in this most recently translated Mahfouz novel, is guided by his motto, “let life be filled with holy madness to the last breath.” He narrates his life story to a friend during one long night in a café in old Cairo. Through a series of bad decisions, he has lost everything: his family, his position in society, and his fortune. A man driven by his passions, he married a beautiful Bedouin nomad for love, and as a consequence pays a punishingly high price. From a life of comfort with a promising future guaranteed by his wealthy grandfather, he descends to the spartan life of a pauper, after being disinherited. Jaafar faces his tribulations with surprising stoicism and hope, sustained by his strong convictions, his spirituality, his sense of mission, and his deep desire to bring social justice to his people.
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Respected Sir
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Rasheed El-Enany
Respected Sir is a story of vaulting ambition. Othman Bayyumi joins the civil service at the lowest point of the professional scale as an archives clerk. From the first minute in his career he is seized by a mad desire to become one day director-general of the department, and his eagerness to fulfill this ambition becomes an exalted and arduous religious quest, for the sake of which no sacrifice is too great.
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Cairo Modern
An Egyptian Novel
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byWilliam M. Hutchins
The novelist’s camera pans from the dome of King Fuad University (now Cairo University) to students streaming out of the campus, focusing on four students in their twenties, each representing a different trend in Egypt in the 1930s. Finally the camera comes to rest on Mahgub Abd al-Da’im. A scamp, he fancies himself a nihilist, a hedonist, an egotist, but his personal vulnerability is soon revealed by a family crisis back home in al-Qanatir, a dusty, provincial town on the Nile that is also a popular destination for Cairene day-trippers. Mahgub, like many characters in works by Naguib Mahfouz, has a hard time finding the correct setting on his ambition gauge. His emotional life also fluctuates between the extremes of a street girl, who makes her living gathering cigarette butts, and his wealthy cousin Tahiya. Since he thinks that virtue is merely a social construct, how far will our would-be nihilist go in trying to fulfill his unbridled ambitions? What if he discovers that high society is more corrupt and cynical than he is? With a wink back at Goethe’s Faust and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Mahgub becomes a willing collaborator in his own corruption. Published in Arabic in the 1940s, this cautionary morality tale about self-defeating egoism and ill-digested foreign philosophies comes from the same period as one of the writer’s best-known works, Midaq Alley. Both novels are comic and heartfelt indictments not so much of Egyptian society between the world wars as of human nature and our paltry attempts to establish just societies.
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