Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World - Softcover

Johnson-Davies, Denys

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9774247809 ISBN 13: 9789774247804

Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press, 2004

Synopsis

Drawing on an intimate knowledge of modern Arabic writing, Denys Johnson-Davies brings together in this collection a colorful mosaic of life as lived and portrayed by Arabs from Morocco to Iraq. From a diverse area of the world with the common factor of a written language, these thirty stories tell of an old Moroccan peasant woman who kills snakes; an Iraqi soldier who returns home as a stranger after years as a prisoner-of-war; a repairer of lost virginities in a Tunisian village; a typically Mahfouzian start to a train journey; the steamy meeting of two women and a cat at the height of an Iraqi summer; the ill-fated attraction of a boy to a magical bird in the Tuareg deserts of Libya; and a novel way of hunting ducks in the Nile Delta. The purveyors of this strange and delightful cornucopia of fictions include Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Gamal al-Ghitani, and Mohamed El-Bisatie from Egypt; Fuad al-Takarli and Mohamed Khudayyir from Iraq; Zakaria Tamer from Syria; Hanan al-Shaykh from Lebanon; and Ibrahim al-Kouni from Libya.

About this title

About the Author:

DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES has produced more than thirty volumes of translation of modern Arabic literature, including The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim (AUC Press, 2008) and The Essential Yusuf Idris (AUC Press, 2009). He received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2007 for Personality of the Year in the Field of Culture.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Arabic

About this edition

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 9774247809
• ISBN 13: 9789774247804
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 252