American imprint: 2303 books

Growing up in Egypt's Nile Delta, Wafaa El Saddik was fascinated by the magnificent pharaonic monuments from an early age, and as a student she dreamed of conducting excavations herself and working in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. At a time when Egyptology was dominated by men, especially those with...

This thought-provoking, semi-autobiographical book tells the story of Aisha, a young Moroccan woman, and her struggle to find an identity in the Morocco of the second half of the twentieth century. Charting Aisha's path through adolescence and young adulthood up to the present, her story is told through...

In a world with no meaning, meaning is an act . . . This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt's dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights. Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring...

The eleven short stories in this book take us back to an Alexandria past, the cosmopolitan city as it was experienced by the author in the years before, during, and following the Second World War. Against a backdrop of major events in Alexandria's history, from the halcyon days of the late 1930s,...

Basrayatha is a literary tribute by author Mohammed Khudayyir to the city of his birth, Basra, on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in southern Iraq. Just as a city's inhabitants differ from outsiders through their knowledge of its streets as well as its stories, so Khudayyir distinguishes between the real...

America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American...

For the first time, the three-part autobiography of one of modern Egypt's greatest writers and thinkers is available in a single paperback volume. The first part, An Egyptian Childhood (1929), is full of the sounds and smells of rural Egypt. It tells of Hussein's childhood and early education in a...

This award-winning historical novel deals with the stormy life of the outstanding Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, using historical sources, and particularly material from the writer's works, to construct the personal and intellectual universe of a fourteenth-century genius. The dominant concern of the...

Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated is a fascinating and highly experimental story based loosely around the author's own experiences in Egypt as a Moroccan student and visiting intellectual. In Cairo the narrator, Hammad, takes us on a deeply personal journey of discovery from the heady days of the...

Ibn Shalaby, like many Egyptians, is looking for a job. Yet, unlike most of his fellow citizens, he is prone to sudden dislocations in time. Armed with his trusty briefcase and his Islamic-calendar wristwatch, he bounces uncontrollably through the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods, with occasional...

The Theocrat takes as its subject one of Arab and Islamic history's most perplexing figures, al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah ("the ruler by order of God"), the Fatimid caliph who ruled Egypt during the tenth century and whose career was a direct reflection of both the tensions within the Islamic dominions...

Enclosed by the Suez Canal and bordering Gaza and Israel, Egypt's rugged Sinai Peninsula has been the cornerstone of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accords, yet its internal politics and security have remained largely under media blackout. While the international press descended on the capital Cairo in...

Galal Amin once again turns his attention to the shaping of Egyptian society and the Egyptian state in the half-century and more that has elapsed since the Nasserite revolution, this time focusing on the era of President Mubarak. He looks at corruption, poverty, the plight of the middle class, and...

From a beginning in an Egyptian Delta town and the port of Alexandria to the scenic vistas of sunny southern California, Ahmed Zewail takes us on a voyage through time his own life and the split-second world of the femtosecond. In this engaging exposé of his life and work until his receipt of the...