Gamal Al-Ghitani

One of Egypt’s greatest contemporary writers, Gamal al-Ghitani (1945–2015) was born into a family of modest means in the Egyptian countryside. He trained as a carpet maker before turning his attention to writing, publishing over a dozen novels and several collections of short stories. This haunting memoir, one of seven autobiographical "notebooks" written before Ghitani’s death, weaves together a series of vignettes in a style that mimics the uneven, discontinuous nature of memory itself. These fragments, or traces, are summoned from across the span of a singular lifetime, from Ghitani’s rural birthplace in Upper Egypt to Cairo, to the Arab world and beyond. We read of his childhood adventures, his erotic awakenings, his time as a political prisoner, and his reports from the battlefront in Iraq and the corridors of power in Syria. There are vivid passages that capture fleeting glances of strangers through car windows, flavors and scents of delicacies he still savored, dreams and sorrows of neighbors in the apartment blocks of Cairo before Nasser, as well as recollections of chance conversations at points of transit, in cafés and on elegant streets, and trysts with unnamed paramours. These memories, and Ghitani’s musings on memory’s own finitude and mutability, make Traces both memoir and a meditation on memory itself, in all its inscrutable workings and inevitable betrayals.

Conjuring the unpredictability of city life in the Middle East, this compilation of stories reveals the metropolis itself through a vibrant assortment of personalities. From the celebrated author collecting an award in the city that exiled him decades before to the forlorn lover waiting at a rendezvous as government officials raid nearby shops, this anthology shows how urban existence is changing faster than ever. Additional tales include engineers racing to complete another "world's tallest building" in Dubai, American helicopters patrolling the Martyrs Bridge in Baghdad, and an Israeli general who invites guests to watch promotional videos for the tank that will "win the next war" while eating biscuits and reciting poetry, all revealing that it is not the landmarks but the people that define the communities across this region. Opening the door to a diversity of subtle and concealed elements, these narratives illustrate how much is not known about this fascinating part of the world.

"The Mahfouz Dialogs" records the memories, views, and jokes of Naguib Mahfouz on subjects ranging from politics to the relationship between his novels and his life, as delivered to intimate friends at a series of informal meetings stretching over almost half a century. Mahfouz was a pivotal figure not only in world literature (through being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win a mass audience), but also in his own society, where he vastly enhanced the image of the writer in the eyes of the public and encapsulated - as the victim of a savage attack on his life by an Islamist in 1994 - the struggle between pluralism, tolerance, and secularism on the one hand and extremist Islam. Moderated by Gamal al-Ghitani, a writer of a younger generation who shared a common background with Mahfouz (al-Ghitani also grew up in medieval Cairo) and felt a vast personal empathy for the writer despite their sometimes different views, these exchanges throw new light on Mahfouz's life, the creation of his novels, and literary Egypt in the last half of the twentieth century.