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NEW BOOK
Author: Somaya Ramadan
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2004-10-15
ISBN: 9774247272
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 75.00
Leaves of Narcissus
This novel of home and homelessness, of exile both physical and psychological, centers on Kimi, a fragile heroine suffering from a rift in her persona, unable to distinguish between her own pain and the pain of others. For Kimi it is not a simple case of to be or not to be, but rather of how to be in disjointed and contrary times. Leaves of Narcissus, like earlier Arabic novels about East-West encounters by male writers such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, and Tayeb Saleh, is about a young Arab student going West in search of education. Here, though, the protagonist is a young woman and her destination is Ireland, a part of the West and at the same time a victim of the ravages of colonialism -- adding ambiguity to the customary representations of the East/West dichotomy. In this captivating novel, Somaya Ramadan displays a rare virtuosity in evoking and interlacing literary motifs -- from the popular to the learned, from the folk to the mythic, from the Egyptian to the Irish -- and poses questions rather than answers, questions that hold a mirror to our selves.
NEW BOOK
Author: Habib Selmi
Publisher: the American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2010-03-15
ISBN: 9774163583
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 75.00
The Scents of Marie-Claire
This novel from one of Tunisia’s leading writers, the first of his works to be translated into English, narrates a love story in all its stages, in all its glorious and inglorious details. Moment by moment we become acquainted with the morning rituals, the desires of the flesh, the turbulence of the spirit, and even a few unattractive personal habits. It is a journey that takes us inside the nuances of what passes between two lovers, from the first glances of attraction to the final words of anger. It is a journey filled with all the hallmarks of the complex relationship between one man and one woman—the mystery and the ambiguity, the intricacy and the confusion—which, in the end, serve to expose its fragility. This is an intimate tale that manages to tell not only the story of two individuals, but also that of the collision of two cultures.
NEW BOOK
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2006-08-15
ISBN: 9774160304
Binding: paperback
Language: english
Price: 50.00
Rhadopis of Nubia
The pharaonic novels of Naguib Mahfouz
Against the background of the high politics of Sixth Dynasty Egypt, a powerful love grows between Rhadopis, a courtesan whose ravishing beauty is unmatched in time or place, and youthful, headstrong Pharaoh Merenra, worshiped by his people as a divine presence on earth. Rhadopis comes of poor peasant stock, but her star rises until she become the most celebrated woman in the kingdom, entertaining her countless lovers, who include the most powerful men in the realm, with her dancing, singing, and stimulating intellectual conversation in her white palace on an island in the Nile. Despite the attention and the endless stream of suitors, however, Rhadopis’s heart remains cold and loveless—until events conspire in the strangest of ways to bring her to the attention of Pharaoh himself. From there the two of them embark on a journey of intense passion that is totally absorbing and ultimately tragic. As their obsession for one another burns wildly, they become caught up in the violent turbulence of the politics of the day—Merenra through his desire to sequester the properties of the priesthood and Rhadopis by her efforts to control the march of destiny and avoid their untimely but inevitable fate. But for Rhadopis, who has played with men’s minds and danced on the scattered shards of their broken hearts, and Pharaoh, who has sought to flout ancient tradition for his own ends, can the power of love ultimately offer protection?
NEW BOOK
Author: Ola Seif
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 0000-00-00
ISBN: 9774242619
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Price: 100.00
Khan al-Khalili: Mapped Guide
This unique, comprehensive guide includes:
- A large fold-out map showing all the Khan's 930 shops.
- A shopper's alphabetical guide to 125 products and services --- what to buy, where to buy, how to buy.
- The history of the Khan, With guided walks through its fascinating alleyways
NEW BOOK
Author: Mohamed Makhzangi
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2006-03-01
ISBN: 9774249690
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 50.00
Memories of a Meltdown
An ‘anti-memoir’ set against the backdrop of the Chernobyl disaster
In the spring of 1986, Mohamed Makhzangi was living in Kiev, an Egyptian doctor studying in the Ukraine. As a result, he—like thousands of others—found himself living a nuclear nightmare when the Chernobyl plant had a catastrophic meltdown. Despite numerous fail-safe protections, human error sent massive quantities of deadly radiation into the serene spring of the Soviet sky. In superbly crafted prose, Memories of a Meltdown describes the days that followed from Makhzangi’s dual perspective, as both an outsider and a victim. Described by the author as an ‘anti-memoir,’ this assemblage of impressions in the aftermath of the meltdown offers a searing account of factual events distilled through the filter of literature. Blending the realism of journalism with the emotional resonance of fiction, Makhzangi conveys the quiet but steadily mounting atmosphere of fear and panic, the dubious reliability of official statements, and an overall loss of the sense of safety, of anything ever being right with the world again. From the balding colleague who is concerned only about whether his hair will fall out, to a grandfather, fetching his young grandson a drink, who believes that there is less contamination in hot tap water than cool, Makhzangi portrays people unwilling or unable to believe in the magnitude of the disaster unfolding around them. In the finest tradition of literary reportage, Makhzangi masterfully conveys here the loneliness of exile, the urgency of a great tragedy, and the intimacy of personal experience.
NEW BOOK
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: the American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 1997-01-01
ISBN: 9774244540
Binding: hardcover
Language: english
Price: 65.00
The Day the Leader Was Killed
Mahfouz traces the life of a middle-class Cairene family living in the early 1980s helplessly watching as their world rapidly disintegrates in “the kingdom of the corrupt.”
In this breathtakingly compact novel, written in the mid-1980s, the focus is once again on the generational paradigm featured in the Cairo Trilogy. This time, Mahfouz traces the life of a middle-class Cairene family living in the early 1980s under President Sadat. It was an era of transition in Egypt, a time of acute crisis, as everywhere ordinary people were being pushed into the ‘’abyss of Infitah.’’ In the mad rush, there was a sense of an ending, a feeling of panic as the innocent helplessly watched their world rapidly disintegrating. A whole way of life with its age-old traditions and values was simply falling apart, making way for a merciless new materialism in ‘’the kingdom of the corrupt,’’ where survival had indeed to be for the fittest. The novel reaches its climax with the assassination of Sadat on October 6, 1981, an event around which the fictional plot is skillfully woven.
NEW BOOK
Author: Robert A. Fernea
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2006-03-01
ISBN: 9774249550
Binding: paperback
Language: english
Price: 60.00
Nubian Ceremonial Life
The building of Egypt's High Dam in the 1960s erased innumerable historic treasures, but it also forever obliterated the ancient land of a living people, the Nubians. In 1963-64, they were removed en masse from their traditional homelands in southern Egypt and resettled elsewhere. Much of the life of old Nubia revolved around ceremonialism, and in this remarkable study, John G. Kennedy and other leading anthropologists from around the world reveal and discuss some of the most important and distinctive aspects of Nubian culture.
Since its original publication, Nubian Ceremonial Life has become a standard text in the fields of anthropology and cultural psychology. In addition to basic ethnographic data, this groundbreaking study contains a number of theoretical discussions on topics of interest to students of comparative religions: the psychology of death ceremonies, the nature of 'taboo,' theories of circumcision rituals, and the importance of trance curing ceremonies. The book also presents information about a village of Nubians who had been resettled some thirty years earlier, thereby providing some clues regarding the possible patterns of future culture change among these recently relocated people. With a new foreword by Robert Fernea, this edition brings back into print a major work of scholarship on the unique ceremonial traditions of a changed and changing Nubian world.
Contributors: Hussein M. Fahim, Armgard Grauer, Fadwa al-Guindi, Samiha al-Katsha, John G. Kennedy, and Nawal al-Messiri.
NEW BOOK
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Bantam Classics; Reissue edition
Publication Date: 1983-12-01
ISBN: 0553213105
Binding: mass Market Paperback
Language: english
Price: 30.00
Pride and Prejudice
For over 150 years, Pride And Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen herself called this brilliant work her "own darling child." Pride And Prejudice, the story of Mrs. Bennet's attempts to marry off her five daughters is one of the best-loved and most enduring classics in English literature. Excitement fizzes through the Bennet household at Longbourn in Hertfordshire when young, eligible Mr. Charles Bingley rents the fine house nearby. He may have sisters, but he also has male friends, and one of these—the haughty, and even wealthier, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy—irks the vivacious Elizabeth Bennet, the second of the Bennet girls. She annoys him. Which is how we know they must one day marry. The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and Darcy is a splendid rendition of civilized sparring. As the characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, Jane Austen's radiantly caustic wit and keen observation sparkle.
NEW BOOK
Author: Ahlam Mosteghanemi
Publisher: the American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2004-04-01
ISBN: 9774246705
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 70.00
Chaos of the Senses
Ahlam Mosteghanemi's second novel picks up where Memory in the Flesh left off, with the story of love set in the battered and bruised Algeria of the1990s. Mosteghanemi takes her readers through the streets of suspicion and suspense, and the ups and downs of a forbidden love affair, through a story within a story, as a writer stuck in a loveless marriage to an important military man inadvertently writes what eventually comes true.
She begins - after a period of not writing - by penning the narrative of a mysterious man who courts the object of his desire through deceptive words, then she helplessly follows the path of her fictitious character only to find that the mystery man exists and it is he who has led her to his door and into his life. One twist leads to the next, as the question remains of which man the writer was destined to meet and fall in love with - the mysterious artist or the doomed journalist.
This lyrical adventure teases the reader with facts for fiction and fiction for facts. The backdrop of political chaos creates a sense of foreboding and fear for two powerless lovers. But where is reality and where is fantasy?
NEW BOOK
Author: Gamal al-Ghitani
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2007-04-01
ISBN: 9774160517
Binding: hardcover
Language: English
Price: 60.00
Pyramid Texts
With its Sufistic parables of the human condition, rendered in a style redolent of both the austere meditations of Borges and the dark engorged ruminations of Arthur C. Clark, Pyramid Texts engages the mind and beguiles the imagination. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last so that, like their subjects, they taper ultimately into nothingness the author evokes the obsessions that have drawn men over the centuries to the brooding presence of mankind's most ancient and mysterious monuments. Among others in a procession of exotic characters, a Moroccan seeker after knowledge spends years contemplating the pyramids in the hope that one day he will understand the mysterious writing that fitfully appears on their sides. Another waits patiently for the moment when the shadow of one will diverge from its accustomed path and bestow immortality, and the Sphinx performs a celestial dance. Pyramid Texts leads us into a world of endless passages and mysterious sighing winds, a world whose claustrophobic and shadowy spaces may be illuminated by flashes of ecstasy leading to scintillating transfigurations and dizzying annihilations.
USED BOOK
Author: Matt Taibbi
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Publication Date: 2008-05-06
ISBN: 0385520344
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 55.00
The Great Derangement
A REVELATORY AND DARKLY COMIC ADVENTURE THROUGH A NATION ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN—FROM THE HALLS OF CONGRESS TO THE BASES OF BAGHDAD TO THE APOCALYPTIC CHURCHES OF THE HEARTLAND Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi set out to describe the nature of George Bush’s America in the post-9/11 era and ended up vomiting demons in an evangelical church in Texas, riding the streets of Baghdad in an American convoy to nowhere, searching for phantom fighter jets in Congress, and falling into the rabbit hole of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Matt discovered in his travels across the country that the resilient blue state/red state narrative of American politics had become irrelevant. A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off—or radicalized—by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders (“they hate us for our freedom”) that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement. Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American subcultures: The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq; The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress; The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants. Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places. Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era.
USED BOOK
Author: Steven Gaines
Publisher: Crown; First Edition edition
Publication Date: 2009-01-27
ISBN: 0307346277
Binding: hardcover
Language: english
Price: 45.00
Fool's Paradise
From the acclaimed bestselling author of Philistines at the Hedgerow comes a remarkably revealing profile of the Miami Beach no one knows–a tale of fabulous excess, thwarted power, and rekindled lives that will take its place among the decade’s best works of social portraiture.
Created from a mix of swampland and dredged-up barrier reef, Miami Beach has always been one part drifter-mecca and one part fantasyland, simultaneously a catch basin for con men, fast-talk artists, and shameless self-promoters, and a Shangri-La for sun worshippers and hardcore hedonists. In Miami Beach it’s often said that "if you’re not indicted you’re not invited." But the city’s mad, fascinating complexity resists easy stereotyping.
Fool’s Paradise is more than just a present-day profile of a dark Eden. Gaines journeys back into the city’s social and cultural history, unearthing stories of the resort’s past that are every bit as absorbing–and jaw-dropping–as those of its present. The book begins with a snapshot of the city’s current excess (this is, after all, a sun-washed hamlet that boasts, on a per capita basis, more bars–and breast implants–than any other place in America), then plunges into the Beach’s origins, chronicling the audacious rise of such hoteliers as the Fontainebleau’s Ben Novack and the Eden Roc’s Harry Mufson, the sharp-elbowed tactics of Al Capone and Frank Sinatra, and the Mac-10 shooting sprees of the Marielito and Colombian drug lords.
From there, the narrative shifts to two wildly eccentric souls who gave their lives to preserving the city’s architectural dazzle and creating its color palette, introduces us to "the Most Powerful Man in Miami Beach," and arrives finally in the modern day, where we meet, among others, a kinky German playboy who once owned a quarter of South Beach and publicly flaunts his sexual escapades; a fabulously successful nightclub promoter whose addictive past seems to have given him a portal into the night world’s id; and a gaggle of young sexy models, dreamers, and schemers on a mission to achieve significance.
Evoking the Beach’s surreal blend of flashy Vegas and old Hollywood glamour, as well as its manic desperation and reckless wealth, Gaines persuasively demonstrates that though the Beach is–in the words of its most famous drag queen–"an island of broken toys . . . a place where people get away with things they’d never get away with anyplace else," it casts an irresistible spell.