Product Description
Drawing on an intimate knowledge of modern Arabic writing, Denys Johnson-Davies brings together a colourful mosaic of life as lived and portrayed by Arabs from Morocco to Iraq. From a diverse area of the world with the common factor of a written language, these thirty stories tell of an old Moroccan peasant woman who kills snakes; an Iraqi soldier who returns home as a stranger after years as a prisoner-of-war; a repairer of lost virginities in a Tunisian village; a typically Mahfouzian start to a train journey; the steamy meeting of two women and a catat the height of an Iraqi summer; the ill-fated attraction of a boy to a magical bird in the Tuareg deserts of Libya; and a novel way of hunting ducks in the Nile Delta. The purveyors of this strange and delightful cornucopia of fictions include Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris and others.
About the Author
Denys Johnson-Davies is the pioneer translator of modern Arabic literature, with more than 25 volumes of translation to his name. He is also interested in Islamic Studies and is co-translator of three volumes of Prophetic Hadith. Recently he has written a number of children's books adapted from traditional Arabic sources, and a volume of his own short stories was published in 1999 under the title Fate of a Prisoner. He lives in Cairo.
