Articles Tagged “Egypt ”
Hosam Aboul-Ela in Cairo
Hosam Aboul-Ela teaches in the department of English and the program in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston. He has lived most of his life in two exotic foreign countries—Egypt and Texas. He is the English translator of the novels Voices by Soleiman Fayyad and Distant Train…...read more »
The Changing Times of the Egyptian Novel
One of my main activities since arriving in Cairo has been to try to update myself on recent developments in the Egyptian novel. I have just finished a work that's received much attention in the local cultural pages since I arrived. It's entitled A Matter of Time and it opens with the idle chatter…...read more »
A Kind of Farewell
Over the past months, I've been living in Cairo and posting regularly about the local literary scene to this blog. In a matter of days, perhaps even by the time this is posted, I'll be back in Texas, and will have traded in the fast lane life of blogging from the big metropolis for my slower,…...read more »
Dispatches: Echoes of an Autobiography by Naguib Mahfouz
My reaction to the work of Naguib Mahfouz has been exceptionally mixed. I have enjoyed the light touch and raffish characters of short novels like Adrift on the Nile (my review) yet I could make no headway on the first volume of the Cairo Trilogy, which seemed almost a parody of the ponderous family…...read more »
Dispatches: The Seventh Heaven by Naguib Mahfouz
by Geoff Wisner
In August 2006, just a few hours after I finished reading The Seventh Heaven, the final work by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, I heard that he had died at the age of 94—a spooky coincidence perfectly in keeping with a book concerned with the afterlife and the supernatural. Mahfouz was the…...read more »
A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed
I nearly gave up on Leila Ahmed’s memoir A Border Passage. After a lovely, quiet opening that describes the wind in the trees at the house on the edge of Cairo where the author grew up, the narrative shifted gears into several pages of rather dry political history. This is going to be too academic,…...read more »
A Rumbling Octopus: Egyptians Take to the Streets in Protest
"The square’s full. The streets feeding into it are full…There’s never been a demonstration like this before…Egypt appeared to be one great demonstration, united in one person and a single chant.” —from Palace Walk, by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by William…...read more »
Imagining more Autumns for North Africa’s Patriarchs: The Dictator Novel in Egypt
In the mid 1970s, at a time when Latin American countries chafed under brutal dictatorships, an amazing literary phenomenon swept through the region. Three powerful novels were published within months of each other by three of the greatest authors of the region hailing from its varied corners. Inspired…...read more »
Censorship in Egypt: An Interview with Magdy El Shafee
In February 2008, WWB published an extract from the first Egyptian graphic novel for adults, Magdy El Shafee's Metro. Set in a chaotic modern Cairo pulsing with economic and social instability, the novel protrays the city as a vortex of political corruption. When the book was published in Egypt two…...read more »
Illustrating Conflict: Perspectives from FIBDA
Under the heading "Algiers, Bubbles without Frontiers," this year's International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Alger, or FIBDA) provides an important space for discussions and works around history, war, and conflict. I previously wrote about…...read more »
Tahrir Square, One Year Ago
As the events of the Arab Spring unfolded last year, WWB published a number of dispatches from and about the affected countries. One of our favorites came from Egyptian graphic novelist Magdy El Shafee. With his fellow artists, Magdy was creating and distributing a graphic journal on the abuses…...read more »
Magdy El Shafee Publishes “Metro” in English
It's Metro Day at WWB. We're celebrating the publication of Magdy El Shafee's graphic novel, available today from Metropolitan Books in Chip Rossetti's translation. Readers will recall that WWB published an extract in February 2008, and that the book was seized on publication in Egypt…...read more »
Magdy El Shafee Arrested and Held at Tora Prison
Magdy El Shafee, author of Egypt’s first graphic novel, Metro, was arrested by security forces on Friday in downtown Cairo. According to fellow author Muhammad Aladdin, El Shafee was detained near Abdel Moneim Riyad Square, where clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and protesters had…...read more »