Description: Short story writing in Egypt was still in its infancy when Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," arrived in Cairo as a young man in the 1940s. Nevertheless, he was immediately impressed by such writing talents of the time as Mahmoud Teymour, Yahya Hakki, Yusuf Gohar, and the future Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and he set about translating their works for local English-language periodicals of the time. He continued to translate over the decades, and sixty years later he brings together this remarkable overview of the work of several generations of Egypt's leading short story writers. This selection of some fifty stories represents not only a cross-section through time but also a spectrum of styles, and includes works by Teymour, Hakki, Gohar, and Mahfouz and later writers such as Mohamed El-Bisatie, Said el-Kafrawi, Bahaa Taher, and Radwa Ashour, as well as new young writers of today like Hamdy El-Gazzar, Mansoura Ez Eldin, and Youssef Rakha.
Brief description: Denys Johnson-Davies has produced more than thirty volumes of translation of modern Arabic literature, including The Essential Naguib Mahfouz (AUC Press, 2011). He received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2007 for Personality of the Year in the Field of Culture.
Review Quotes: "Johnson-Davies, a distinguished translator from Arabic, has produced a collection of nearly 60 Egyptian short stories that usefully adds to the growing corpus of Arab literature available in English."--Choice