Love and death and the passage between entry into the world and exit from it are the focus of this collection of short stories. Buthaina Al Nasiri is an Iraqi author who has lived in Cairo since 1979. Despite this physical and temporal distance from her homeland, much of her material derives from it and many of the stories in this collection reflect her deeply felt nostalgia for Iraq. In contrast to many contemporary female writers, she confesses to being less interested in the position of women in society than in that of people in general and the sufferings they experience between birth and the end of life. None the less, some of her best stories depict the many-colored relationships that exist between the sexes. Buthaina Al Nasiri’s work has been widely translated into European languages, but this is the first volume of her stories to appear in English, for which renowned translator Denys Johnson-Davies has selected work from a career of short-story writing spanning some thirty years.
Final Night
Short Stories
Love and death and the passage between entry into the world and exit from it are the focus of this collection of short stories. Buthaina Al Nasiri is
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Buthaina Al Nasiri, born in Iraq in 1947, graduated from the College of Arts of the University of Baghdad and has lived in Cairo since 1979, where she runs a publishing house that specializes in the works of Iraqi writers under UN sanctions. Five collections of her own short stories have been published in Arabic. Denys Johnson-Davies is the pioneer translator of modern Arabic literature, with more than 25 volumes of translation to his name. He lives in Cairo.
Denys Johnson-Davies
Denys Johnson-Davies has produced more than thirty volumes of translation of modern Arabic literature,
including The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim (AUC Press, 2008), The Essential Yusuf Idris (AUC Press,
2009), and The Essential Naguib Mahfouz (AUC Press, 2011). He was described by Edward Said as
“the leading Arabic–English translator of our time.”
