This highly original novel tells an alternative history in which the Arab Spring leads Egypt and the Middle East to the brink of nuclear war“[A] wonderful ‘prophetic’ novel”—Jamal KhashoggiIn what might be his last night on Earth, the Egyptian president’s translator Ali pens a letter to his estranged son, telling him of everything that has led him, and his country, to breaking point.Ali is traveling aboard a cargo ship on a dangerou...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTIONSpring, 1990. After years of searching in vain, a stranger passes a scrap of paper to Zina. It’s from Aziz: the man who vanished the day after their wedding almost two decades ago. It propels Zina on a final quest for a secret desert jail in southern Morocco, where her husband crouches in despair, dreaming of his former life.Youssef Fadel pays powerful testament to a terrible period in Morocco’s hist...

A story of betrayal, desire, and family drama, written by a giant of Egyptian popular fiction who shocked readers in the 1950s when this Lolita-esque novel first appeared and whose work has never before been available in EnglishSixteen-year-old Nadia had been raised by her father, after her parents divorced when she was only a baby. Indulged and petulant, she remained the only female in her father’s life. But when she returns from boarding school to find that he ha...

A NOTABLE AFRICAN BOOK OF 2024 (BRITTLE PAPER)Written by iconic Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, this classic of love, desire, and family breakdown smashed through taboos when first published in Arabic and continues to captivate audiences todayIt is 1950s Cairo and 16-year-old Amina is engaged to a much older man. Despite all the excitement of the wedding preparations, Amina is not looking forward to her nuptials. And it is ...

"Abdelilah Hamdouchi seems to have found the formula for the emergence of the Moroccan detective novel."—Liberation KaleidoscopeWhen young and handsome Othman married Sofia—sophisticated, French, rich, and forty years his senior—he found his ticket out of a life of desperate poverty in the slums of Casablanca.But when Sofia is brutally murdered, the police quickly zero in on Othman as the prime suspect.With his mistress, the love of his lif...

Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (1919–1990) is the most popular and prolific writer of Arabic fiction in the twentieth century. The Politics of Melodrama is the first book to take on this giant of Arabic fiction and consider both his outsized cultural influence and consequential position in Egyptian politics. Jonathan Smolin frames the work of Abdel Kouddous not only as romantic melodrama, but as an entirely new model of Arabic fiction as dissent—contesting the fate of the 1952 revolution, c...

Facing rising demands for human rights and the rule of law, the Moroccan state fostered new mass media and cultivated more positive images of the police, once the symbol of state repression, reinventing the relationship between citizen and state for a new era. Jonathan Smolin examines popular culture and mass media to understand the changing nature of authoritarianism in Morocco over the past two decades. Using neglected Arabic sources including crime tabloids, television movies, true-crim...

Ten Arab Filmmakers provides an up-to-date overview of the best of Arab cinema, offering studies of leading directors and in-depth analyses of their most important films. The filmmakers profiled here represent principal national cinemas of the Arab world—Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, and Syria. Although they have produced many of the region's most-renowned films and gained recognition at major international festivals, with few exceptions these filmmakers have received little...