Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews Edited and with an Introduction by Gauri ViswanathanPantheon Books, 2001 Two writers who are well known for their championing of the literary canon are Harold Bloom and George…
Naguib Mahfouz, Mirrors [Al-Maraya] Illustrated by Seif Wanli Translated by Roger Allen —March 2005 What an odd book! It can be a goad to do something experimental in the future. It is a series of…
I was rereading Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, which is a great collection of essays on literature and culture with exploration of the experiences of dislocation, exile, migration, and empire as well…
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He was the author of 40 novels, 350 short stories, and five plays. When I was in Palestine in 2003, I would read…
“You can’t understand Egypt without Mahfouz—without his characters, with whom every reader, Arab or not, can identify.” —Tahar Ben Jelloun For our next discussion of Arab Writers in Translation, we will consider the short novel…