A01=Mohamed Mustagab
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Egyptian Stories
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Mohamed
Mustagab
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Tales from Dayrut
The black humor of life in an Upper Egyptian village from a previously untranslated writer
Product details
- ISBN 9789774167072
- Weight: 263g
- Dimensions: 125 x 200mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jun 2015
- Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
- Publication City/Country: EG
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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This collection of fourteen connected stories and a novella, From the Secret History of Human 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 humour and Swiftian sarcasm of the insider who knows his society only too well. When the stillness of a day's end is shattered by a single gunshot, poignant beauty merges seamlessly into horror, and when a police officer seeking to unravel a murder finds himself with more body parts than he knows what to do with, violence tips as easily into farce. In counterpoint, the author's ofte surrealist imagination explores the myserties of a landscape where seductive women haunt dusty paths and a man may find himself crushed like a worm beneath another's foot. Elsewhere, the horizons of 'my village' expand to include other countries (the author worked in the Arabian Peninsula for a number of years), where equally disastrous consequences follow on folly and self-delusion. Previously almost unknown in English, Mustagab's voice is both original and disturbing.
Mohamed Mustagab (1938-2006), born in the Upper Egyptian town of Dayrut, was general director of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo, and wrote prolifically in the latter half of the twentieth century, receiving numerous prizes. From the Secret Life of Numan Abdel Hafez was chosen as one of the top hundred novels from the Arab world in the last century.
Humphrey Davies is the translator of a number of Arabic novels, including The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (AUC Press, 2004). He has twice been awarded the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
