The American University In Cairo Press imprint: 238 books
Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt
On the Peripheries of Society
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2017
Little is known about Egypt's Gypsies, called Dom by scholars, but variously referred to by Egyptians as Ghagar, Nawar, Halebi or Hanagra, depending on their location. Moreover, most Egyptians are oblivious to the fact that there are today large numbers of Gypsies dispersed from the outskirts of villages...
The Bazaar in the Islamic City
Design, Culture, and History
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2012
The Middle Eastern bazaar is much more than a context for commerce: the studies in this book illustrate that markets, regardless of their location, scale, and permanency, have also played important cultural roles within their societies, reflecting historical evolution, industrial development, social...
Egyptian Hip-Hop: Expressions from the Underground
Cairo Papers in Social Science Vol. 34, No. 1
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2016
This ethnographic study of the Egyptian underground hip-hop scene examines the artists who collectively molded the scene and analyzes their practices and explores how these artists have interacted with and responded to political and social upheaval and change. It reveals how rappers approached and...
The Zafarani Files
An Egyptian Novel
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2009
An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the café owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband all are subjects...
by Ibrahim Aslan
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2008
Set in the author's own Nile-side neighborhood of Warraq, Aslan's second novel, the first to be translated and published in English, chronicles the daily rhythm of life of rural migrants to Cairo and their complex webs of familial and neighborly relations over half a century. It opens with the mysterious...
by Naguib Mahfouz
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2010
A novel of loss and memory from the Egyptian Nobel laureate. On a school playground in the stylish Cairo suburb of Abbasiya, five young boys become friends for life, making a nearby café, Qushtumur, their favorite gathering spot forever. One is the narrator, who, looking back in his old age on their...
The Essential Naguib Mahfouz
Novels, Short Stories, Autobiography
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2011
A selection of the most important works of Egypt's Nobel literature laureate. Naguib Mahfouz, the first and only writer of Arabic to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature, wrote prolifically from the 1930s until shortly before his death in 2006, in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, plays,...
by Naguib Mahfouz
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2011
A classic Mahfouz story exploring themes of marriage across class lines, spirituality, and the harsh realities of a precarious life. Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi, the main character in this most recently translated Mahfouz novel, is guided by his motto, "let life be filled with holy madness...
Homecoming
Sixty Years of Egyptian Short Stories
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2012
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...
Private Pleasures
An Egyptian Novel
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2013
Private Pleasures describes the three-day sex, drink, and drug binge of a thirty-something newsreader in the back streets and crumbling apartments of his native Giza, that pullulating mass of humanity that, like an ugly sister, sits opposite Cairo on the Nile's west bank. Pursued by an unshakable...
by Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2010
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 Time-Travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets
A Modern Arabic Novel
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2010
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...
Sports and Society in the Middle East
Cairo Papers in Social Science Vol. 34, No. 2
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2016
The sociology of sports in the Middle East has been neglected compared to other world regions. This volume aspires to encourage a greater focus on this topic. Here are assembled papers that discuss various aspects of this subject. As it happens all deal with football (soccer) largely in Egypt but...
Women Travelers in Egypt
From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2013
Until late in the nineteenth century, few guide books acknowledged the presence of women as travelers - although women had been traveling around the world for centuries. Women's accounts of their journeys, distinct from those of male travelers, began to appear more frequently in the early nineteenth...