Denys Johnson-Davies

Six colorful stories adapted from the oral tradition of Egypt.

"The settings include desert wadis in the Arabian Gulf, a small Sudanese village, the packed streets of Cairo, and a sniper's alley in Beirut. 'Deal Concluded', the tale of an arms sale with more to it than the salesman suspects, shows a sardonic sense of humour. The same humour is present in the volume's title story, in which the ruler of a Gulf sheikhdom and his English commandant of police engage in an elaborate dance of deadly etiquette over the fate of a young murderer."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of fourteen tales about the folk hero Nasreddin Hoca, also known as Goha, a man with a reputation for being able to answer difficult questions in a clever way.

A collection of fourteen tales about the folk hero Nasreddin Hoca, also known as Goha, a man with a reputation for being able to answer difficult questions in a clever way.

"Yusuf Idris (1927-91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story, just as Mahfouz is considered the father of the Arabic novel. He studied and practiced medicine, but his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle, and in writing-and his writing, whether in his regular newspaper columns or in his fiction, often reflected his political convictions. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature more than once, and when the prize went to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Idris felt that he had been passed over because of his outspoken views on Israel. In all, Yusuf Idris wrote some twelve collections of superbly crafted short stories, mainly about ordinary, poor people, many of which have been translated into English and are included in this collection, along with an extract from one of his novels, in this collection of the best of his work."--Jacket.

One of the tales from the Thousand and one nights. Unhappy in his home life, Maarouf escapes from Cairo and with the help of a genie flies to a foreign land. There, by chance, he meets an old friend who gives him an idea -- to pretend he is the owner of a huge caravan which is on its way to the city carrying expensive goods. Believing in Maarouf's story the merchants lend him great sums of money. However, Maarouf is soon in trouble when he starts to believe his own story.

This dazzling anthology features the work of seventy-nine outstanding writers from all over the Arab-speaking world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, Syria in the north to Sudan in the south.Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies, called by Edward Said "the leading Arabic-to-English translator of our time," this treasury of Arab voices is diverse in styles and concerns, but united by a common language. It spans the full history of modern Arabic literature, from its roots in western cultural influence at the end of the nineteenth century to the present-day flowering of Naguib Mahfouz's literary sons and daughters. Among the Egyptian writers who laid the foundation for the Arabic literary renaissance are the great Tawfik al-Hakim; the short story pioneer Mahmoud Teymour; and Yusuf Idris, who embraced Egypt's vibrant spoken vernacular. An excerpt from the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North, one of the Arab world's finest, appears alongside the Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni's tales of the Tuaregs of North Africa, the Iraqi writer Mohamed Khudayir's masterly story "Clocks Like Horses," and the work of such women writers as Lebanon's Hanan al-Shaykh and Morocco's Leila Abouzeid.From the Trade Paperback edition.