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Seller's Description:
London. 1978. Heinemann. 1st African Writers Series Edition. Good in Slightly Worn and Faded Wrappers. 0435901974. African Writers Series. Edited and revised by Maged el Kommos and John Rodenbeck; introduced by John Fowles. 141 pages. paperback. AWS197. Cover design by Elizabeth Rodenbeck. keywords: Literature Africa Egypt. FROM THE PUBLISHER-NAGUIB MAHFOUZ, the most successful and best-known Arabic novelist, was born in the Jamaliyyah quarter of Cairo in 1911, the son of a merchant. He graduated from Cairo University in 1934 with a degree in philosophy. He has worked as a civil servant and in the administration of Cairo University and then for governmental film broadcasting organisations. He has published some twenty volumes of novels and short stories many of which have been made into films. The Trilogy written between 1945 and 1952 stands out. For seven years after Nasser's revolution he wrote nothing, but since that time has published a dozen other books including Midaq Alley. John Fowles says in his introduction to this classic story of the interlocking lives of people in a hotel in Alexandria: 'Open cities are the mothers of open societies, and their existence is especially essential to literature-which is why, I suppose, we cherish our illusions about them, and forgive them so many of their sins. In the case of Alexandria, that prototype cosmopolis and melter of antitheses, we can hardly be blamed. Antony and Cleopatra, Cavafy, E. M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell. there is a formidably distinguished list of foreign celebrants and from them we have taken an indelible image of the place. It is languorous, subtle, perverse, eternally fin de siEcle; failure haunts it, yet a failure of such richness that it is a kind of victory. What we have conspicuously lacked, in this comfortable pigeon-holing, is a view from the inside, from modern Egypt herself. The one we are now granted may come as something of a shock to those who still see Alexandria through European eyes. ' inventory #45874.
