An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo’s old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the café owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband—all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher’s reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humor prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.
The Zafarani Files
An Egyptian Novel
Gamal al-Ghitani
Translated byFarouk Abdel Wahab
1 June 2015
344 pp.
14.5X22.5cm
ISBN 9789774166945
For sale worldwide
$19.95
Gamal al-Ghitani, born in 1945, is the author of Zayni Barakat (AUC Press, 2004), The Mahfouz Dialogs (AUC Press, 2007), Pyramid Texts (AUC Press, 2007), The Zafarani Files (AUC Press, 2009), The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz (AUC Press 2012), and The Book of Epiphanies (AUC Press, forthcoming). He is editor-in-chief of the literary review Akhbar al-adab.
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The Mahfouz Dialogs
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The Mahfouz Dialogs records the memories, views, and jokes of Naguib Mahfouz on subjects ranging from politics to the relationship between his novels and his life, as delivered to intimate friends at a series of informal meetings stretching out over almost half a century. Mahfouz was a pivotal figure not only in world literature (through being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win a mass audience), but also in his own society, where he vastly enhanced the image of the writer in the eyes of the public and encapsulated—as the victim of a savage attack on his life by an Islamist in 1994—the struggle between pluralism, tolerance, and secularism on the one hand and extremist Islam. Moderated by Gamal al-Ghitani, a writer of a younger generation who shared a common background with Mahfouz (al-Ghitani also grew up in medieval Cairo) and felt a vast personal empathy for the writer despite their sometimes different views, these exchanges throw new light on Mahfouz’s life, the creation of his novels, and literary Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.
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15 March 2008
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240 pp.15X23cm
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