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Masr El Arabia for Publishing and Distribution
We are Masr El Arabia for Publishing and Distribution, an Egyptian publishing house located in Cairo – Egypt. Established in 1977 with a focus on distribution and few but carefully selected titles. In 2007 we decided to shift more to publishing and started with academic books then lately we added a new line which is translated literature, we care most about the quality of the work and we managed to present many foreign authors for the first time to the Arab readers such as Goncalo Tavares, Immanuel Mifsud, Reiner Englemann, Julian Fuks, Kelly James Clark and others, also we managed to publish the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (Chernobyl Prayer) 2015, Jo Nesbo and many others during the past few years. We would like to mention that prior to the publishing house, we established Al Thaqafa Al Jadeeda Bookshop in the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi) which was one of the first book shops in the country. We participate in almost all the Arab book fairs, and we have our books distributed in every Arab country through the major bookshop chains and local distributors.
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The Dukduk's Whimper
by Jalal Barjas
An IPAF winner’s memoir on his formation as a writer and reader Our lives are essentially a story and we are the characters. “The Duduk’s Whimper” is story of Jalal Barjas, beginning with his birth in 1970 and ending in 2021. His story is inspired by his life as a human being and a writer with little time at his disposal. It is a life that intersects with many others in our Arab world. The idea for this biography/novel was born out of a question the author asked about his motivations for reading, writing, and traveling. The result is a candid, bold narrative that presents his image to the reader without idealism or heroism. This memoir unfolds along three lines: the biography of the writer, the stories of three places, and the tale of three books he read. Through these narratives, Barjas reveals unknown aspects of his life and the difficult path he had to take to reach his esteemed position in the literary world. He takes us on an entertaining and profound journey with a high level of language that reveals many aspects that are not only relevant to him, but also to everyone who reads this book. It delves deeply into reading, writing, travel, love, failure, success, and the formation of human joys and sorrows starting from childhood. “The Duduk’s Whimper” is the story of a writer who only has three hours a day to write, yet he managed to establish himself as one of the great writers.
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FictionJanuary 2016The Autumn of Innocence
by Abbas Beydoun
In his novel, The Autumn of Innocence, prominent Lebanese poet and novelist Abbas Beydoun artfully weaves a tragic story of a father-son relationship that ends disastrously with the son's violent death. This story unfolds along with the Arab Spring movement and explores the motivations behind religious extremism and questions cultural constructs of masculinity. The novel opens with a letter from Ghassan to his cousin, describing how his father Massoud strangled his mother to death when Ghassan was just three years old. Afterward, Massoud flees the village in southern Lebanon. For 18 years, no one hears from him, and Ghassan grows up stigmatized by his father's violent crime. In time, Ghassan's aunt Bushra-Massoud's sister-makes a confession: She encouraged Massoud to kill his wife, believing that his wife's low socioeconomic status would bring embarrassment to their wealthy family. Bushra also reveals that Massoud was driven to kill his wife because he feared that she would tell someone that he was impotent, undermining his sense of manhood and social status. Meanwhile, Massoud has moved to southern Syria, where he remarried and had two more sons. During the Arab Spring, the militant groups fighting the Syrian regime transform him into a religious extremist. In the second half of the novel, Massoud return to the village in southern Lebanon. He brings with him a group of men. Together they seize control of the village and terrorize its inhabitants. After killing the dogs, they begin murdering the villagers in the name of religion. One of Ghassan's friends is among the victims, and Massoud also threatens his family. Ghassan decides that he must kill his father, avenging the death of his friend and the deaths of the other villagers. In the end, he fails and is beheaded by Bushra's son, his cousin, who is has joined Massoud's thugs. Beydoun captures the shifting points of view in a family shattered by the tyranny of normative masculinity and the resulting violence. The victims are women, of course, but also the men like Ghassan who reject these social and cultural expectations. The novel also portrays the rise of religious extremism and the terrorism it can inspire, which wreaks havoc on the lives of ordinary people. Beydoun's engaging language imbues the characters and the places they inhabit with a vibrancy and vitality that transcends the difficult subject matter.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2016Zionism in Arab discourses
by Ofir Winter, Uriya Shavit
Zionism in Arab discourses presents a ground-breaking study of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through analyses of hundreds of texts written by Arab Islamists and liberals from the late-nineteenth century to the 'Arab Spring', the book demonstrates that the Zionist enterprise has played a dual function of an enemy and a mentor. Islamists and liberals alike discovered, respectively, in Zionism and in Israeli society qualities they sought to implement in their sown homelands. Focusing on Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian political discourses, this study uncovers fascinating and unexpected Arab points of views on different aspects of Zionism; from the first Zionist Congress to the First Lebanon War; from gardening in the early years of Tel Aviv to women's service in the Israeli Defence Forces; from the role of religion in the creation of the state to the role of democracy in its preservation. This study presents the debates between and within contesting Arab ideological trends on a conflict that has shaped, and is certain to continue and shape, one of the most complicated regions in the world. ;
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Children's & YAJanuary 2011The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air
by Abdo Wazen
In his first YA novel, cultural journalist and author Abdo Wazen writes about a blind teenager in Lebanon who finds strength and friendship among an unlikely group. Growing up in a small Lebanese village, Bassim’s blindness limits his engagement with the materials taught in his schools. Despite his family’s love and support, his opportunities seem limited. So at thirteen years old, Bassim leaves his village to join the Institute for the Blind in a Beirut suburb. There, he comes alive. He learns Braille and discovers talents he didn’t know he had. Bassim is empowered by his newfound abilities to read and write. Thanks to his newly developed self-confidence, Bassim decides to take a risk and submit a short story to a competition sponsored by the Ministry of Education. After winning the competition, he is hired to work at the Institute for the Blind. At the Institute, Bassim, a Sunni Muslim, forms a strong friendship with George, a Christian. Cooperation and collective support are central to the success of each student at the Institute, a principle that overcomes religious differences. In the book, the Institute comes to symbolize the positive changes that tolerance can bring to the country and society at large. The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air is also a book about Lebanon and its treatment of people with disabilities. It offers insight into the vital role of strong family support in individual success, the internal functioning of institutions like the Institute, as well as the unique religious and cultural environment of Beirut. Wazen’s lucid language and the linear structure he employs result in a coherent and easy-to-read narrative. The Boy Who Saw the Color of Air is an important contribution to a literature in which people with disabilities are underrepresented. In addition to offering a story of empowerment and friendship, this book also aims to educate readers about people with disabilities and shed light on the indispensable roles played by institutions like the Institute.
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FictionDirt and Stars
by Ahmad Lufti
How do you imagine the Arabs before Islam? People who drink alcohol, milk goats, and fight each other for trivial reasons? Or perhaps you imagine them ignorant in an environment of darkness and sand? In this short story collection, Ahmad Lufti presents a fresh picture of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam, its legends and poets, its kings and its oral traditions. Inspired by the storytelling form of Scheherazade in “One Thousand and One Nights”—in which one narrator tells a story about another narrator, and another—as well as traditional Arab tales, Lufti’s stories explore and exalt Arab history and culture as well as larger themes of love, weakness, and power. Commentary from the Author: I am trying to reintroduce prose in Arab stories, as an attempt to praise authors whose books were highly underestimated. These works of art were deeply criticized for focusing on the pre-Islamic era or for adopting a classical rigid style. It is crucial to revive Arab stories, this pristine and rich field that would never fail to exist, even if all authors were to perish. This has proven of importance in modern stories, which are the reflection of the contemporary human. How can we refute modern stereotypes, if Arab literature is absent from today’s books?
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The Halva-Maker: The Fatimid Trilogy
by Reem Bassiouney
Generations of pastry makers experience a turbulent era in Egyptian history The novel “Al-Halawani” is a historical narrative that delves into a significant period in the life of the Arab history, when the region faced the challenges of the Crusader attacks, the emergence of heroes, and the endurance of severe hardships. The novel is divided into three stories. The first story recounts the arrival of the Fatimids in Egypt from Tunisia and the life history of the leader Jawhar Al-Siqilli, who built the city of Cairo. The second story is about the Al-Mustansiriya Famine or the famines that occurred in Egypt during the time of the Fatimid Caliph Al-Mustansir and how they ravaged the Egyptian population until the leader Badr Al-Jamali came to save Egypt from the famine, re-dividing its provinces, and building the current walls of Cairo. In the third story, the novel touches on the rise to power of Salah Al-Din Al-Ayyubi, the escalating threat of the Crusaders, and the end of the Fatimid state in Egypt. The novel depicts also the role of Arab women in confronting the Crusaders and enduring famines and dangers.
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October 2023The Nile of the Living
by Mohamed Abdallah
“In the old days, passing on an inheritance was rarely an issue. Oh, there were always old men to complain about the folly of the new generations and cheeky brats ready to mock their elders, but, on the whole, the world of sons resembled that of fathers, and the lessons of the latter were passed on without much difficulty. Today, each era seems to create its own world, bringing its own new life into it. The challenge is not to lose sight of the aspects of continuity that reign from one era to the next.” Mohamed Abdallah Egypt, its neighbors. Cairo, a city that has created an arena for itself between the jaws of the desert. Its river emerges from elsewhere, the Nile, always there, meandering amiably between Cairo's buildings, sometimes disappearing behind a mosque or cinema, before reappearing for good, an ancient comrade in a procession backwards through the decades. Its nourishing trickles are laden with secrets, the destinies of men and women and the mysteries of millennia. One era? No, several. At the beginning, or rather at the end, two novelists, two cousins who don't know each other but remember the same universe. In their books, they recount its beauty, greatness and pettiness, successes and failings. The root of this painful poetics? A revived horizon, refracted from one era to the next. Revolutions wished for, sung about, mourned. A world, several continents believing themselves to be in the hollow of a valley where faces emerge, voices rise, psalms are declaimed, music dances, scents run through the streets... Oumm Koulthoum, Youcef Cha-hine, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ahmad Shawqi, Cheikh Imam, Fouad Nagm, Soad Hosny and... take their place at Café Isfet in the El Gamaliyya district. Broken, twisted, surviving, magnificent friendships. Unspoken loves, over-thought, under-experienced. Good-natured, jovial, albeit frazzled, witnesses. And, in the midst of this field of superb ruins, life, its aspirations, the arts and their.
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The ArtsFebruary 2025Tattoos in crime and detective narratives
Marking and remarking
by Kate Watson, Katharine Cox
Tattoos in crime and detective narratives examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film, from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851-1914, and c1955 to present). It makes an original contribution to understandings of crime and detective genre and the ways in which tattoos act as a mimetic device that marks and remarks these narratives in complex ways. With a focus on tattooing as a bodily narrative, the book incorporates the critical perspectives of posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies. The grouped essays examine the first tattoo renaissance, the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary culture through literature, children's literature, film and television. The collection has a broad appeal, and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars, but in particular those with an interest in crime and detective narratives and skin studies.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2016The Model Arab League manual
A guide to preparation and performance
by Philip D’Agati, Holly Jordan
This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the Model Arab League (MAL) programme for first time and returning students. Drawing on over fourteen years of combined experience in successfully leading award-winning MAL delegations, Philip D'Agati and Holly A. Jordan provide students with an introduction to being a delegate and tips on effective research techniques as well as simplifying the complex process of taking on the identity of a state and then representing it effectively in a MAL debate. ;
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September 2013The Renaissance and Grand Voyage
by Zhang Wushen
This book helps the readers know the european Renaissance, religious reform. geographic discovery and the formation of a national government，USA.
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To Love Life
by Alawiya Sobh
The novel revolves around the heroine Basma, who suffers from a neurological disease. The sedative medications prescribed by her doctor have affected her memory and so she has become confused. She tries to restore her memory and her body, which has been plagued by painful spasms – something difficult for someone like her, a dancer and choreographer. The novel unfolds inconsistently, telling the story of Basma from childhood on, experiences with her first boyfriend, Ahmad, and her sickness after following the tragic departure of him and her father during the Lebanese civil war. In addition to Basma’s story, we read about the lives of the people she knew and liked throughout her life, including her friend, Anisa, and her emotionally and financially tight husband, and how writing changed her life and helped her fight her disability. We also read about Amina, who is emotionally hungry, and Nizar who investigated different politics and beliefs, ending up insane. In addition to other characters with stories that run in parallel with the main character, Basma, whose life centres on her relationship with her lover and husband, Youssef. A creative painter, his shifts towards fundamentalism lead her to separate from him as she is passionate about life, love and dancing. The novel accurately describes the similarities between her sick body and that of Arab cities collapsed due to the sectarian wars that took place after the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. The heroine documents her sickness to a virtual friend, describing what made her sick and how she resists her illness with will and determination. Her narrative expresses her rejection of religious, sectarian and terrorist extremism of all sects and religions, especially those that diverged from the true Islamic religion and its compassionate teachings. In this novel we find poignant human details and a graceful narration full of expressions that make the reader anxious to know more about the destinies of all its characters. Between the memory of a past saturated with loss and love, and a crueler present witnessed in collapsing cities, Basma clings to her body that keeps on betraying her. Who said that our lives and our bodies are different from the stories of our cities? Who among us knows if our most recent dance was the farewell dance, or a new beginning?
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2024The Gulf monarchies after the Arab Spring
by Cinzia Bianco
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Fiction2021Eye on Egypt: Café Riche
by Maisoon Saqer
The book opens a unique door to the history of Cairo and its journey from a social and cultural perspective and aims to build a new and different narrative for this history—one that shows Cairo as a cosmopolitan, multicultural city. Cairo’s Cafe Riche has a deep cultural history and a broad creative and social heritage. Saqer describes it as “the site where endless friendships are established between the café and history.” Saqer’s narrative is not just about the small café, but rather constitutes observance and analysis of the presence of this café in the history of Egypt and how we can view many events surrounding it. Here there is no separation between the political and the cultural, between the historical, the social, and the artistic. The book combines history and narrative, which makes it a documented historical biography on the one hand and a creative work on the other. It also documents an important era in Egypt’s cultural history by examining the cultural and social transformations in modern Egyptian history and highlighting prominent intellectuals and creators associated with the cafe and the history of intellectual life in Egypt.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2023Golden Mummies of Egypt
Interpreting identities from the Graeco-Roman period
by Campbell Price, Julia Thorne
Golden Mummies of Egypt presents new insights and a rich perspective on beliefs about the afterlife during an era when Egypt was part of the Greek and Roman worlds (c. 300 BCE-200 CE). This beautifully illustrated book, featuring photography by Julia Thorne, accompanies Manchester Museum's first-ever international touring exhibition. Golden Mummies of Egypt is a visually spectacular exhibition that offers visitors unparalleled access to the museum's outstanding collection of Egyptian and Sudanese objects - one of the largest in the UK.
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In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat
by Iman Mersal
‘In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat’ is a book that traces the life of an unknown Egyptian writer who died in 1963, four years before the release of her only novel. The book does not follow a traditional style to present the biography of Al-Zayyat, or to restore consideration for a writer who was denied her rights. Mersal refuses to present a single story as if it is the truth and refuses to speak on behalf of the heroine or deal with her as a victim, but rather takes us on a journey to search for the individuality that is often marginalised in Arab societies. The book searches for a young woman whose family burned all her personal documents, including the draft of her second novel, and was completely absent in the collective archives. The narration derives its uniqueness from its ability to combine different literary genres such as fictional narration, academic research, investigation, readings, interviews, fiction, and fragments of the autobiography of the author of the novel. The book deals with the differences between the individuality of Enayat, who was born into an aristocratic family, graduated from a German school and wrote her narration during the domination of the speeches of the Nasserism period, and that of Mersal, a middle-class woman who formed her consciousness in the 1990s and achieved some of what Enayat dreamed of achieving but remained haunted by her tragedy. The book deals with important political, social and cultural issues, as we read the history of psychiatry in modern Egypt through the pills that Enayat swallowed to end her life on 3 January 1963, while her divorce summarises the continuing suffering of women with the Personal Status Law. We also see how the disappearance of a small square from her neighbourhood reveals the relationship between modernity and bureaucracy, and how the geography of Cairo changes, obliterated as the result of changes in political regimes. In the library of the German Archaeological Institute, where Enayat worked, we find an unwritten history of World War II and, in her unpublished second novel, we see unknown stories of German scientists fleeing Nazism to Cairo. We also see how Enayat’s neglected tomb reveals the life story of her great-grandfather, Ahmed Rashid Pasha, and the disasters buried in the genealogy tree.
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Fiction2017Summer Rains
Winner of the 2018 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Young Author
by Ahmad Al Qarmalawi
Using music as a thread that connects the past to the present, this novel explores what happens when traditional and cultural heritage clash with modernity. The characters face the impact of modernization on heritage and arts versus the need to protect and preserve their traditional culture and must choose between the pursuit of materialism versus spiritual balance. Al Qarmalawi writes about a wide range of music from Sufism to the present era of electronic musical arts, and Summer Rains addresses the current Arab youth crisis, in which young people find themselves torn between fundamentalism and modernity. (An extended English-language report on this book will be available soon.)
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January 2013The Madmen of Bethlehem
by Osama Alaysa
Adopting the story-within-a-story structure of Arabian Nights, author Osama Alaysa weaves together a collection of stories portraying centuries of oppression endured by the Palestinian people. This remarkable novel eloquently brings together fictional characters alongside real-life historical figures in a complex portrayal of Bethlehem and the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the West Bank. The common thread connecting each tale is madness, in all its manifestations. Psychological madness, in the sense of clinical mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, finds expression alongside acts of social and political madness. Together, these accounts of individuals and communities provide a gateway into the histories of the city of Bethlehem and Palestine. They paint a picture of the centuries of political oppression that the Palestinian people have endured, from the days of the Ottoman Empire to the years following the Oslo Accords, and all the way to 2012 (when the novel was written). The novel is divided into three sections, each containing multiple narratives. The first section, “The Book of a Genesis,” describes the physical spaces and origins of Bethlehem and Dheisheh Refugee Camp. These stories span the 19th and 20th centuries, transitioning smoothly from one tale to another to offer an intricate interpretation of the identity of these places. The second section, “The Book of the People Without a Book”, follows parallel narratives of the lives of the patients in a psychiatric hospital in Bethlehem, the mad men and women roaming the streets of the city, and those imprisoned by the Israeli authorities. All suffer abuse, but they also reaffirm their humanity through the relationships, romantic and otherwise, that they form. The third and final section, “An Ephemeral Book,” follows individuals—Palestinian and non-Palestinian—who are afflicted by madness following the Oslo Accords in 1993. These stories give voice to the perspectives of the long-marginalized Palestinian population, narrating the loss of land and the accompanying loss of sanity in the decades of despair and violence that followed the Nakba, the 1948 eviction of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. The novel’s mad characters—politicians, presidents, doctors, intellectuals, ordinary people and, yes, Dheisheh and Bethlehem themselves—burst out of their narrative threads, flowing from one story into the next. Alaysa’s crisp, lucid prose and deft storytelling chart a clear path through the chaos with dark humor and wit. The result is an important contribution to fiction on the Palestinian crisis that approaches the Palestinians, madness, and Palestinian spaces with compassion and depth.
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Literature & Literary StudiesDecember 2009Intertextuality in modern Arabic literature since 1967
by Luc Deheuvels, Mike Thompson, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, Paul Starkey
This volume of essays is the first to be dedicated to the subject of intertextuality in modern Arabic literature. Beginning with a general overview of the topic by Roger Allen, it brings together essays on a range of writers from all parts of the Arab world, including, among others, Edwar al-Kharrat, Sa'd Allah Wannus, Najib Mahfuz, Rabi' Jabir, Salim Matar and the recently deceased Sudanese writer al-Tayyib Salih, whose seminal work Season of Migration to the North heralded a new phase in the modern Arabic literary tradition. The volume, which also includes two essays on aspects of intertextuality in Gulf literature, also discusses transformations of popular medieval literature such as the Alf Layla wa-Layla (the Thousand and One Nights) in modern Arabic literature. ;
