“With the confidence of a woman who knows three languages,” the Egyptian writers featured here write fabulism, social realism, modernist irony, and other tongues. In “Veiler of all deeds,” by Hamdi Abu Golayyel, “People are delighted when they hear the news that a pious man has been caught red-handed in some wrongful act.” A man waiting for a job interview is his own worst enemy in Mahmoud al Wardani’s “The Dark and the Daylight,” while a seamstress stitches a life for her children in Na’am al-Baz’s “Mrs. Saniya’s Holiday.” The sensual crooning of a wedding singer awakens old and new passions on an island in the Nile, between Egypt and Sudan, in Haggag Hassan Oddoul’s “Flirting with the Moon.” A hen and a rooster aim for respect and bring about a cultural revolution in Salwa Bakr’s “The Rooster’s Egg: A Fable of Ancient Thebes.” Literary journalist Mohamed Makhzangi observes spring in Chernobyl after nuclear disaster. And poets Tamer Fathy and Iman Mersal, like the Bedouin in Mersal’s “Sometimes Wisdom Possesses Me,” “knew early on that words fly/and cannot be weighed.”

Thanks to Chip Rossetti of American University in Cairo Press — the most prolific and essential publisher of Arabic literature in English — for his labors as guest editor in bringing us these works.