This wry take on Kafka’s novel The Trial revolves around its narrator’s attempts to petition successfully the elusive ruling body of his country, known simply as "the Committee." Consequences for his actions range from the absurd to the hideous.Ibrahim offers an unbroken first-person narrative rendered in brief, crisp prose framed by a conspicuous absence of vivid imagery. Furthermore, the petitioner is a man without identity. The ideal antihero, he remains, as does his co...

A riveting novel that is both an indictment and an elegy, a second-person memoir of Nasser’s final months in the voice of his former prisoner.In 1959, at the age of twenty-two, Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim was imprisoned by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime. Over the following five years in prison in Egypt’s Western Desert, Ibrahim kept diaries that he smuggled out on cigarette papers.In this novel, Ibrahim takes up Nasser as a fictional character tied tigh...

Sonallah Ibrahim’s 2000 masterpiece offers readers a view of twentieth-century world events through the diary pages of his titular character1950s Cairo: the intersection of conflicting dreams and political destinies. In this classic novel translated for the first time into English, idealistic reporter Rushdy encounters the enchanting Warda at a clandestine leftist meeting. Their fates would be forever linked. After Warda goes missing, Rushdy immerses himself in her...

A young son wanders Cairo trying to comprehend why his mother has disappearedSet in the turbulent years before the 1952 revolution that would overthrow King Farouk and bring Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Stealth — by Sonallah Ibrahim, one of Egypt’s most respected and uncompromising novelists — is a gripping story seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. A young Egyptian’s coming of age proves halting and uncertain as he fails to outgrow dependence ...

That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential Arabic novels. Composed in the wake of a five-year prison sentence, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city.That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim’s modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential novels written in Arabic since WWII. Composed after a five-year term in prison, the semi-aut...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.Britain has invaded Afghanistan twice before in the nineteenth century. Both times tenacious Afghan fighters defended their country to humiliating British defeats. The Soviet Union also discovered what a tough enemy the Afghans are after nearly a decade of conflict from 1979 to 1989. When not fighting foreign invaders, Afghanistan was torn apart by Civil War from 1990 to 1996, resulting in victory for the Taliban.The Afg...

**WINNER OF THE NEW YORKER BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION • From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt."Engrossing. . . . [Said has] an almost ...

“Riveting . . . This thorough work is immensely detailed yet readable and continuously engaging.” —Publishers WeeklyAn immersive, gripping account of the rise and fall of Iran's glamorous Pahlavi dynasty, written with the cooperation of the late Shah's widow, Empress Farah, Iranian revolutionaries and US officials from the Carter administration.In this remarkably human portrait of one of the twentieth century's most complicated per...

First time in paperback, with a new Introduction and final chapterWorld affairs expert and intrepid travel journalist Robert D. Kaplan braved the dangers of war-ravaged Afghanistan in the 1980s, living among the mujahidin—the “soldiers of god”—whose unwavering devotion to Islam fueled their mission to oust the formidable Soviet invaders. In Soldiers of God we follow Kaplan’s extraordinary journey and learn how the thwarted Soviet invasion gave rise to the ruthless ...

**A luminous essay collection about loneliness, contentment, and the books and cities that have shaped the experience of a Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red."One of the essential writers that both East and West can gratefully claim as their own.” —The New York Times Book ReviewIn the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing fiction, he has also produced scores of ...

As Ambassador and Special Envoy on Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, Peter Tomsen has had close relationships with Afghan leaders and has dealt with senior Taliban, warlords, and religious leaders involved in the region's conflicts over the last two decades. Now Tomsen draws on a rich trove of never-before-published material to shed new light on the American involvement in the long and continuing Afghan war.This book offers a deeply informed perspective on how Afghanistan's history as...

This reader consists of the full Arabic texts of eleven short stories by established Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian and Jordanian writers. The earliest story, written in 1929, is by the Egyptian Mahmud Tahir Lashin; and the most recent, written in 1972, is by the Iraqi writer, Fu'ad Al-Takarli. Each story is supplemented by an introduction, with biographical information about the author, placing him in his literary context; a description of the contents; and a brief analysis of the story itself, ...