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NEW BOOK
Author: Ahmed Abdel-Gawad
Publisher: the American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2007-06-30
ISBN: 9774160622
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Price: 100.00
Enter In Peace: The Doorways of Cairo Homes
This photographic book sheds new light upon the architectural and decorative elements of historic doorways from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cairo. Previous studies on the subject have been few and far between, and have paid more attention to the Cairo of Khedive Ismail—the new quarter of the city. Enter in Peace focuses instead on those doorways of houses built in Cairo’s older neighborhoods, and inhabited by Egypt’s middle classes. Included here are over 150 photographs, illustrating eighty-one of these doorways as well as the facades of the buildings in which they appear. The book records their dimensions and their various architectural and stylistic elements, from the structure of doors, lintels, and paneling, to common designs and motifs. Built during a period of great change and modernization in Egypt, these doorways reflect the Ottoman, European, neo-Pharaonic, and Islamic Revival architectural styles prevalent at the time. In addition to popular arabesque and Islamic patterns, many include a snake-shaped motif, a design element dating back to the pharaonic period.
Ahmed Abdel-Gawad has made a careful study of these historic doorways, with descriptive comments on the houses’ original owners and dates of construction, drawing on tax records and historical documentation to present them in context. He traces the shift in building styles that followed the decline of craft guilds in the late nineteenth century, while charting the rise of new architectural influences and techniques in the following decades. Handsomely illustrated and thoroughly researched, Enter in Peace provides an important visual record of Cairo’s rapidly disappearing architectural heritage.
USED BOOK
Author: Aicha Lemsine
Publisher: Quartet Books; First Edition Thus edition
Publication Date: 1994-03-01
ISBN: 0704370344
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 37.00
The Chrysalis
The novel recounts the story of a family over three generations. It is a small book though, a mere 175 pages to tell the life of an entire family before, during and post-war in Algeria up to the mid-70s. But the aim seems to lay elsewhere, that of telling the evolving social condition of the Algerian woman, and her rights or lack thereof, during these three cornerstone eras.
NEW BOOK
Author: Denys Johnson-Davies
Publisher: the American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2009-03-01
ISBN: 9774162188
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 60.00
In a Fertile Desert
Here, for the first time, is a volume of short stories from this commercially and culturally vital and vibrant center of the Arab world. Life before oil in this region was harsh, and many of the stories in this collection by both men and women from all corners of the country tell of those times and the almost unbelievable changes that have come about in the space of two generations. Some tell of the struggles faced in the early days, while others bring the immediate past and the present together, revealing that the past, with all its difficulties and dangers, nonetheless possesses a certain nostalgia.
Contributors: Abdul Hamid Ahmed, Roda al-Baluchi, Hareb al-Dhaheri, Nasser Al-Dhaheri, Maryam Jumaa Faraj, Jumaa al-Fairuz, Nasser Jubran, Saleh Karama, Lamees Faris al-Marzuqi, Mohamed al-Mazroui, Ebtisam Abdullah Al-Mu'alla, Ibrahim Mubarak, Mohamed al-Murr, Sheikha al-Nakhy, Mariam Al Saedi, Omniyat Salem, Salma Matar Seif, Ali Abdul Aziz al-Sharhan, Muhsin Soleiman, 'A'ishaa al-Za’aby.
NEW BOOK
Author: Zahi Hawass
Publisher: the American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2010-09-15
ISBN: 9771780271
Binding: paperback
Language: English
Price: 40.00
Wonders of the Pyramids
A visit to the magnificent Pyramids of Giza, the one remaining Wonder of the ancient world, is incomplete without enjoying the performance of the spectacular Sound & Light Show of music, historical narration, and lights and images played out on the ancient stones themselves.
These new, full-color presentations serve as the ideal record—or foretaste—of the Sound & Light experience, with a historical introduction by internationally renowned Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, and the complete script of the show, accompanied by over 60 beautiful photographs of the light show, the monuments themselves, and the ancient sites of the surrounding region.
NEW BOOK
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2000-04-04
ISBN: 0385499094
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 55.00
Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth A Novel
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
In this beguiling new novel, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in the United States, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--and the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.
NEW BOOK
Author: Hoda Barakat
Publisher: the American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2005-10-01
ISBN: 0815608330
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 75.00
Disciples of Passion
Disciples of Passion chronicles the civil war in Lebanon through the troubled and sometimes quasi-hallucinatory mind of a young man who has experienced kidnapping, hostage exchange, and hospital internment. As he recalls his village childhood and recounts his relationship with a woman of a different faith, his fragmented narrative probes the uncertainties of political testimonial and ascriptions of responsibility in wartime. Marilyn Booth's fluid translation brings to an English audience one of the Arabic language's finest contemporary novelists. Widely celebrated in France, where she currently lives in exile (from Lebanon), Hoda Barakat writes from personal experience: her novels focus on the civil war in Lebanon and how it shaped the lives of people marginalized by the conflict. Compelling scenarios of war and its aftermath of suffering and destruction are integrated into subtle psychological portraits - with protagonists often propelled into unexpected action.
NEW BOOK
Author: Jennifer Putzi
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: 2012-06-01
ISBN: 0820343447
Binding:
Language: English
Price: 45.00
Identifying Marks
What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's Queequeg. This study looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual.
Examining such texts as Typee, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, The Morgesons, Iola Leroy, and Contending Forces, Putzi relates the representation of the marked body to significant events, beliefs, or cultural shifts, including tattooing and captivity, romantic love, the patriarchal family, and abolition and slavery. Her particular focus is on both men and women of color, as well as white women-in other words, bodies that did not signify personhood in the nineteenth century and thus by their very nature were grotesque. Complicating the discourse on agency, power, and identity, these texts reveal a surprisingly complex array of representations of and responses to the marked body--some that are a product of essentialist thinking about race and gender identities and some that complicate, critique, or even rebel against conventional thought.
USED BOOK
Author: Steve Berry
Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition
Publication Date: 2007-12-11
ISBN: 0345485777
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 30.00
The Venetian Betrayal (Cotton Malone)
In 323 B.C.E, having conquered Persia, Alexander the Great set his sights on Arabia, then suddenly succumbed to a strange fever. Locating his final resting place–unknown to this day–remains a tantalizing goal for both archaeologists and treasure hunters. Now the quest for this coveted prize is about to heat up. And Cotton Malone–former U.S. Justice Department agent turned rare-book dealer–will be drawn into an intense geopolitical chess game.
After narrowly escaping incineration in a devastating fire that consumes a Danish museum, Cotton learns from his friend, the beguiling adventurer Cassiopeia Vitt, that the blaze was neither an accident nor an isolated incident. As part of campaign of arson intended to mask a far more diabolical design, buildings across Europe are being devoured by infernos of unnatural strength.
And from the ashes of the U.S.S.R., a new nation has arisen: Former Soviet republics have consolidated into the Central Asian Federation. At its helm is Supreme Minister Irina Zovastina, a cunning despot with a talent for politics, a taste for blood sport, and the single-minded desire to surpass Alexander the Great as history’s ultimate conqueror.
Backed by a secret cabal of powerbrokers, the Federation has amassed a harrowing arsenal of biological weapons. Equipped with the hellish power to decimate other nations at will, only one thing keeps Zovastina from setting in motion her death march of domination: a miraculous healing serum, kept secret by an ancient puzzle and buried with the mummified remains of Alexander the Great–in a tomb lost to the ages for more than 1,500 years.
Together, Cotton and Cassiopeia must outrun and outthink the forces allied against them. Their perilous quest will take them to the shores of Denmark, deep into the venerated monuments of Venice, and finally high inside the desolate Pamir mountains of Central Asia to unravel a riddle whose solution could destroy or save millions of people–depending on who finds the lost tomb first.
NEW BOOK
Author: Ahmed Alaidy
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press; 2nd edition
Publication Date: 2009-10-15
ISBN: 9774163095
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Price: 60.00
Being Abbas el Abd
"The millennial generation's most celebrated literary achievement." Al-Ahram Weekly "The first glimmer of hope for a true fictional renaissance an instantly rewarding read embraced by an unprecedented range of literary figures" The Daily Star "What is madness?" asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy's jittery, funny, and angry novel. Assuring readers that they are about to find out, the narrator takes us on a journey through the insanity of present-day Cairo in and out of minibuses, malls, and crash pads, navigating the city's pinball machine of social life with tolerable efficiency. But lurking under the rocks in his grouchy, chain-smoking, pharmaceutically-oriented, twenty-something life are characters like his elusive psychiatrist uncle with a disturbing interest in phobias. And then there's Abbas, the narrator's best friend who surfaces at critical moments to drive our hero into uncontrollably multiplying difficulties. For instance, theres the ticklish situation with the simultaneous blind-dates Abbas has set up for him on different levels of a coffee-shop in a Cairo mall with two girls both called Hind. With friends like Abbas, what paranoiac needs enemies?
NEW BOOK
Author: Juliane Hammer
Publisher: University of Texas Press; 1St Edition edition
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
ISBN: 0292702965
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Price: 50.00
Palestinians Born in Exile
In the decade following the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, some 100,000 diasporic Palestinians returned to the West Bank and Gaza. Among them were children and young adults who were born in exile and whose sense of Palestinian identity was shaped not by lived experience but rather through the transmission and re-creation of memories, images, and history. As a result, "returning" to the homeland that had never actually been their home presented challenges and disappointments for these young Palestinians, who found their lifeways and values sometimes at odds with those of their new neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza.
This original ethnography records the experiences of Palestinians born in exile who have emigrated to the Palestinian homeland. Juliane Hammer interviews young adults between the ages of 16 and 35 to learn how their Palestinian identity has been affected by living in various Arab countries or the United States and then moving to the West Bank and Gaza. Their responses underscore how much the experience of living outside of Palestine has become integral to the Palestinian national character, even as Palestinians maintain an overwhelming sense of belonging to one another as a people.
NEW BOOK
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Publication Date: 2004-10-01
ISBN: 977424673X
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Price: 65.00
Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber
In one of his regular columns in Al-Ahram Weekly, Naguib Mahfouz at the age of 89 wrote of his feeling of having reached the penultimate station of his life, and noted how it reminded him of his annual journey from Cairo to Alexandria: at Sidi Gaber Station he begins to prepare his luggage, ready to get off the train, because the next station is the final one.
This celebratory volume, published on the occasion of the Nobel laureate's 90th birthday, brings together a selection of the more personal, reflective pieces that have appeared over the past seven years. They reveal a writer concerned as always with the human condition, with his own thought processes, and with the craft of writing, offering rare insights into the way a great writer thinks and works. The range and quality of writing is even more remarkable when one remembers that since a nearly fatal knife attack in 1994, the injuries Mahfouz sustained, combined with his failing eyesight, have made it almost impossible for him to write. But as a man who has devoted his life to the written word, Mahfouz now prepares his weekly articles through conversations with his friend Mohamed Salmawy, who has selected and gathered the pieces in this collection. Mahfouz fans and anyone interested in learning more about the life, times, and thoughts of one of the major figures of modern Arabic literature will find this volume an essential addition to their bookshelf.
NEW BOOK
Author: Alia Mamdouh
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Publication Date: 2006-04-01
ISBN: 1558614931
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Price: 65.00
Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad
“This first novel by an Iraqi woman to be published in English in the United States is a hallucinatory incantation…an ode to a city…(with) its private courtyards and public baths where the women in Huda’s life rage and pray and love and scream.”—Ms. Magazine
Now in paperback, Naphtalene captures a fierce and defiant young girl as she struggles to form her identity in 1950s Baghdad amid a world of unfulfilled women and family tragedies.
Iraqi exile Alia Mamdouh is a journalist, essayist, and novelist living in Paris who received the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature in 2004.