Palace Walk transports us into the life of a Cairo family during Egypt’s occupation by British forces in the 1900s. The father, Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, is somber and tyrannical with his wife and children, but at night seeks pleasure in the aesthetic and erotic. His wife, Amina, is a willing prisoner in a society where it is forbidden for a virtuous woman to leave her house except in the company of her husband or adult sons. Aisha, their younger daughter, dares to peer through the mashrabeya from which the women view the world. And Fahmy, their second son, is caught up in the violence that threatens them all as Egypt struggles to become free.
Palace Walk
Naguib Mahfouz
Translated byWilliam M. Hutchins
Olive E. Kenny
514 pp.
15X23cm
ISBN 9789774166518
For sale only in the Middle East
$19.95
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.
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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.
...read more
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.
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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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Naguib Mahfouz
His Life and Times
Rasheed El-EnanyNaguib Mahfouz (1911 –2006) is the only Arab writer to have been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The author of thirty-five novels, fifteen collections of short stories, twenty-five film screenplays, numerous critical works, and in his later years over five hundred short fictions based on his dreams (partly published as The Dreams and Dreams of Departure by the AUC Press in 2004 and 2007), he has been hugely influential on several generations of Arab writers, and his books are now read in more than forty languages around the world. In its citation for the Nobel prize, the Swedish Academy of Letters noted that Mahfouz “through works rich in nuance—now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous—has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind.” And he has been described by Nadine Gordimer as “one of the greatest creative talents in the realm of the novel in the world,” by Ahdaf Soueif as a “massively important influence on Arabic literature,” and by Alaa Al Aswany as “the founder of the new Arab novel . . . . our father.” In this first biography of Naguib Mahfouz in English, Rasheed El-Enany looks at the life of the man and the work of the writer, and assesses the oeuvre and legacy of a towering figure in the Egyptian and Arab literary world who was able to reach far beyond his own linguistic and cultural boundaries to an admiring readership across the globe.
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15 March 2008
Hardbound
208 pp.30 illus.
13X20cm
$18.95
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).
...read more
Paperback
288 pp.15X23cm
$16.95
Karnak Café
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRoger Allen
At a Cairo café, a cross-section of Egyptian society, young and old, rich and poor, are drawn together by the quality of its coffee and the allure of its owner, legendary former dancer Qurunfula. When three of the young patrons disappear for prolonged periods, the older customers display varying reactions to the news. On their return, they recount horrific stories of arrest and torture at the hands of the secret police, and the habitués of the café begin to withdraw from each other in fear, suspecting that there is an informer among them. With the nighttime arrests and the devastation of the country’s defeat in the 1967 War, the café is transformed from a haven of camaraderie and bright-eyed idealism to an atmosphere charged with mounting suspicion, betrayal, and crushing disillusionment. Exposing the dark underbelly of ideology, and delving into the idea of the ‘necessary evils’ of social upheaval, Karnak Café remains one of the Nobel laureate’s most pointedly critical works, as relevant and incisive today as it was when it was first published in 1974.
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116 pp.12.5X20cm
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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.
...read more
Hardbound
136 pp.12.5X20cm
$19.95