Karim Chammas returns to Lebanon, his family, and his past after ten years of establishing a new life in France. Back in Beirut, Karim reacquaints himself with his brother Nassim, now married to his former love Hind, and old friends from the leftist political circles within which he once roamed under the nom de guerre Sinalcol. By the end of his six-month stay, he has been reintroduced to the chaos of cultural, religious and political battles that continue to rage in Lebanon. Overwhelmed by the experiences of his return, Karim is forced to contemplate his identity and his place in Lebanon's history. The story of Karim and his family is born of other stories that intertwine to form an imposing fresco of Lebanese society over the past fifty years. Broken Mirrors examines the roots of an endemic civil war and a country's unsettled past.

Product Description: In British-occupied Egypt, on the eve of the 1952 revolution, respected landowner Abd el-Aziz Gaafar has fallen on hard times. Bankrupt, he moves his family to Cairo and takes a menial job at the Automobile Club, a luxurious lodge for its European members, where Egyptians appear only as fearful servants...read more

Product Description: Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of “the Fariyaq,” alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women’s rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures, all the while celebrating the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language...read more

Product Description: Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of “the Fariyaq,” alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England, and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women’s rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures, all the while celebrating the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language...read more

Product Description: Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of ‘the Fariyaq,’ alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves from his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women’s rights, sexual relationships between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures...read more

Product Description: This collection of fourteen connected stories and a novella, From the Secret History of Numan Abdel Hafez, takes us deep into Upper Egypt and the village of Dayrut al-Sharif, in which Mohamed Mustagab was born. To depict a world renowned for its poverty, ignorance, vendettas, and implacable code of honor, Mustagab deploys the black humor and Swiftian sarcasm of the insider who knows his society only too well...read more

Product Description: This paperback compendium edition combines Naguib Mahfouz's first three novels, all set in ancient Egypt, which skillfully explore recurring themes within human relationships: the balance between destiny and individual agency, the sanctity of the bonds to the land and religion, and the constant power struggles that affect human lives at multiple levels...read more

Product Description: Private Pleasures describes the three-day sex, drink, and drug binge of a thirty-something newsreader in the back streets and crumbling apartments of his native Giza, that pullulating mass of humanity that, like an ugly sister, sits opposite Cairo on the Nile's west bank...read more

Product Description: This lexicon complements the critical edition (OLA 141) and translation (OLA 166) of Yusuf al-Shirbini's celebrated portrait of Egyptian rural society in the seventeenth century, Hazz al-Quhuf bi-Sharh Abi Shaduf (Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded), a work that, with some six thousand words of contextualized colloquial Egyptian Arabic, also constitutes a unique pre-nineteenth-century source for the study of that dialect...read more

Product Description: Though Egypt was ruled by Turkish-speakers through most of the period from the ninth century until 1952, the impact of Turkish culture there remains under-studied. This book deals with the period from 1805 to 1952, during which Turkish cultural patterns, spread through reforms based on those of Istanbul, may have touched more Egyptians than ever before...read more

Product Description: In Re:viewing Egypt, Xavier Roy’s breathtaking photographs of Egypt offer us a haunting vision of a country and its people. They are also a lesson in the art of photography itself, inviting us to experience images as metaphor, to extend our notions of reality...read more

Product Description: In 1986, when this autobiography opens, the author is a typical fourteen-year-old boy in Asyut in Upper Egypt. Attracted at first by the image of a radical Islamist group as "strong Muslims," his involvement develops until he finds himself deeply committed to its beliefs and implicated in its activities...read more

Product Description: "The millennial generation's most celebrated literary achievement." Al-Ahram Weekly "The first glimmer of hope for a true fictional renaissance an instantly rewarding read embraced by an unprecedented range of literary figures" The Daily Star "What is madness?" asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy's jittery, funny, and angry novel...read more

Product Description: 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...read more