Karnak Cafe

Karnak Cafe PDF Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307793850
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation by the secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion, fear, and betrayal. At a Cairo café in the 1960s, a legendary former belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family of regulars, including a group of idealistic university students. One day, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the students disappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail's beautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, they are apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. It is only years later, after their lives have been further shattered, that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrific stories and learns how the government used them against one another. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself enters the Café and sits among his former victims, claiming a right to join their society of the disillusioned. Now translated into English for the first time, Naguib Mahfouz's tale of the insidious effects of government-sanctioned torture and the suspension of rights and freedoms in a time of crisis is shockingly contemporary.

Karnak Cafe

Karnak Cafe PDF Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307793850
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation by the secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion, fear, and betrayal. At a Cairo café in the 1960s, a legendary former belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family of regulars, including a group of idealistic university students. One day, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the students disappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail's beautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, they are apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. It is only years later, after their lives have been further shattered, that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrific stories and learns how the government used them against one another. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself enters the Café and sits among his former victims, claiming a right to join their society of the disillusioned. Now translated into English for the first time, Naguib Mahfouz's tale of the insidious effects of government-sanctioned torture and the suspension of rights and freedoms in a time of crisis is shockingly contemporary.

Beyond The Aegean

Beyond The Aegean PDF Author: Elia Kazan
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307807320
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
From Elia Kazan, the celebrated writer and director: a huge, stunning story of a word in tumult and an immigrant’s life redeemed. It is a pivotal moment in history. The First World War has barely ended. Greek forces are reclaiming Anatolia from the Turks. And Stavros Topouzoglou—who twenty years earlier, escaping oppression of Turkish rule, fled to America only to discover the venality of his dream of an American life—disembarks to reclaim his homeland. Here he will recast his life and rid himself of his obsession with the elegant American woman who has become for him the ultimate symbol of success. He will marry an Anatolian girl who will treat him like and “agha.” He will have the life his father had. Stavros’s energy and arrogance propel him to an astonishing success in his war-torn country. Deep in the interior of Anatolia, he meets the woman who he thinks will complete this new vision of himself—the fiercely independent Thomna. But he does not know that her passion matches his own twenty years before—to get to America at any cost. His passion now is for Anatolia, and bringing his mother and sister back from America, he pursues his fortune further into dangerous areas, behind the lines of combat—even when learns that the Allies have deserted the Greeks, even after he loses his brother to the Greco-Turkish war. As the novel unfolds, we see Stavros and his dreams of wealth and home becoming inextricably entwined with the Greek cause—compelling him, at the risk of sacrificing his life with Thomna, to a level of selflessness and heroism he has never before imagined. Beyond the Aegean is a novel dramatically, historically, and emotionally powerful, a novel that both stands uncompromisingly on its own and brings to a close Elia Kazan’s commanding saga of one immigrant life.

The Day the Leader Was Killed

The Day the Leader Was Killed PDF Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307483614
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
From the Nobel Prize laureate and author of the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, a beguiling and artfully compact novel set in Sadat's Egypt. The time is 1981, Anwar al-Sadat is president, and Egypt is lurching into the modern world. Set against this backdrop, The Day the Leader Was Killed relates the tale of a middle-class Cairene family. Rich with irony and infused with political undertones, the story is narrated alternately by the pious and mischievous family patriarch Muhtashimi Zayed, his hapless grandson Elwan, and Elwan's headstrong and beautiful fiancee Randa. The novel reaches its climax with the assassination of Sadat on October 6, 1981, an event around which the fictional plot is skillfully woven. The Day the Leader Was Killed brings us the essence of Mahfouz's genius and is further proof that he has, in the words of the Nobel citation, "formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind."

In the Country of Men

In the Country of Men PDF Author: Hisham Matar
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141027037
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond games on the hot pavement outside his home beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business - but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. In his father's worrying absence, Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood. And, as lies and fears intensify, it feels as if the walls of Suleiman's home will break with the secrets held within it.

The Final Hour

The Final Hour PDF Author: محفوظ، نجيب،
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9774163885
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Hamid Burhan, a retired government employee, and his loyal wife Saniya have built themselves a home in the quiet southern suburb of Helwan, where they raise their son and two daughters, expecting life to remain as blessed as it was in the photograph of the happy family at a picnic in a Nileside park in the early 1930s. Events in the wider world impinge wars, revolution, peace with Israel while Saniya and the old house in Helwan remain the bedrock of the family's values. But everyone else is buffeted in one way or another by the tumultuous processes of change in Egyptian politics and society. In this compact novel written in 1982, Naguib Mahfouz again uses a family saga, as he did in his Cairo Trilogy, to reflect on the processes of enormous social transformation that Egypt underwent in the space of a few generations in the twentieth century.

The Quarter

The Quarter PDF Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Saqi Books
ISBN: 0863563856
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
Meet the people of Cairo's Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late to love; and Boss Saqr who stashes his money above the bath. A neighbourhood of demons, dancing and sweet halva, the quarter keeps quiet vigil over the secrets of all who live there. This collection by pre-eminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz was recently discovered among his old papers. Found with a slip of paper titled 'for publishing 1994', they are published here for the first time. Resplendent with Mahfouz's delicate and poignant observations of everyday happenings, these lively stories take the reader deep into the beating heart of Cairo.

The Egyptian Coffeehouse

The Egyptian Coffeehouse PDF Author: Dalia Mostafa
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755635299
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The coffeehouse is a microcosm of the larger Egyptian society with its history of multiculturalism and great diversity. It is not only a social space which was created and shaped by the people over decades in their streets, neighbourhoods and cities, but it also occupies a sphere in the popular imagination full of stories, memories and social networks. Despite the coffeehouse's cultural centrality and socio-political importance in Egypt, academic research and publications on its significance remain sparse. This volume aims to fill this gap by presenting, for the first time in English, a full study analysing the importance of the coffeehouse as an urban phenomenon, with its cultural, historical, economic and political significance in contemporary Egyptian society. The volume shows how historically the coffeehouse has always played a key role as a commercial enterprise; and culturally, as a place for rich literary and artistic production which has multi-layered representations in Egyptian novels, cinema and popular music, amongst other genres. Economically, the coffeehouse has been vital for accessing job opportunities, especially for informal workers; in addition to having played a crucial role in political mobilisation during decisive historical events, as well as in recent years during the 2011 revolution and its aftermath. Through extended interviews with six residents in Cairo, the authors further examine the role and influence of the coffeehouse as a significant feature of contemporary Egyptian life and urban landscape.

Committed to Disillusion

Committed to Disillusion PDF Author: David Fred DiMeo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9774167619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Arabic literature; Egypt; 20th century; history and criticism.

Committed to Disillusion

Committed to Disillusion PDF Author: David DiMeo
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
ISBN: 1617977578
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Can a writer help to bring about a more just society? This question was at the heart of the movement of al-adab al-multazim, or committed literature, which claimed to dominate Arab writing in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, however, leading Egyptian writers had retreated into disillusionment, producing agonized works that challenged the key assumptions of socially engaged writing. Rather than a rejection of the idea, however, these works offered reinterpretation of committed writing that helped set the stage for activist writers of the present. David DiMeo focuses on the work of three leading writers whose socially committed fiction was adapted to the disenchantment and discontent of the late twentieth century: Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Despite their disappointments with the direction of Egyptian society in the decades following the 1952 revolution, they kept the spirit of committed literature alive through a deeply introspective examination of the relationship between the writer, the public, and political power. Reaching back to the roots of this literary movement, DiMeo examines the development of committed literature from its European antecedents to its peak of influence in the 1950s, and contrasts the committed works with those of disillusionment that followed. Committed to Disillusion is vital reading for scholars and students of Arabic literature and the modern history and politics of the Middle East.

Working Days

Working Days PDF Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140144574
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during an astonishing burst of activity between June and October of 1938. Throughout the time he was creating his greatest work, Steinbeck faithfully kept a journal revealing his arduous journey toward its completion. The journal, like the novel it chronicles, tells a tale of dramatic proportions—of dogged determination and inspiration, yet also of paranoia, self-doubt, and obstacles. It records in intimate detail the conception and genesis of The Grapes of Wrath and its huge though controversial success. It is a unique and penetrating portrait of an emblematic American writer creating an essential American masterpiece.