Denys Johnson-Davies

And Other Stories

The Fate of a Prisoner

Short Stories from the Arab World (Modern Arabic Writing)

Under The Naked Sky

Ezzeddin Ibrahim

The hadith qudsi are the sayings of the Prophet divinely communicated to him. The present collection has been compiled from all the available books of hadith. The forty chosen here are all well authenticated and present many of the doctrinal, devotional and ethical elements of Islam. A scholarly introduction deals fully with the subject and shows the way in which the hadith qudsi differs from the Qur'an and from the Prophetic hadith. This selection and translation has been made by the translators of An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith. Forty Hadith Qudsi is regarded as a companion volume and has been printed in similar format with the original Arabic text given alongside the English translation.

Arbaʻūn Al-Qudsīyah

Ranging from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day, a treasury of modern Arab literary works features the contributions of eighty outstanding writers from all over the Arab world, including Naguib Mahfouz, Tewfik al-Hakim, Mahmoud Teymour, Yusuf Idris, Tayeb Salih, Ibrahim al-Koni, Mohamed Khudayir, Leila Abouzeid, and Hanan al-Shaykh. Original. 15,000 first printing.

The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction

Najīb Maḥfūẓ

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, screenplays, a regular weekly newspaper column, and in later life his intensely brief and evocative Dreams. His Cairo Trilogy achieved the status of a world classic, and the Swedish Academy of Letters in awarding him the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature noted that Mahfouz "through works rich in nuance--now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous--has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind". Here Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," makes an essential selection of short stories and extracts from novels and other writings, to present a cross-section through time of the very best of the work of Egypt's Nobel literature laureate. --Book Jacket.

The Essential Naguib Mahfouz

Short story writing in Egypt was still in its infancy when Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as the leading ArabicEnglish 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 Egypts 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.

Sixty Years of Egyptian Short Stories

Homecoming

Nobody has done more for modern Arabic literature in translation than Denys Johnson-Davies, described by the late Edward Said as "the leading Arabic English translator of our time." With more than twenty-five volumes of translated Arabic novels, short stories, plays, and poetry to his name, and a career spanning some sixty years, he has brought the works of a host of writers from across the Arab world to an ever-widening English readership. Here he tells the story of a life in translation, and gives intimate glimpses of many of the Arab writers who are becoming increasingly known in the west. In the 1940s, while teaching at Cairo University, he came to know such iconic figures as Yahya Hakki, Tewfik al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris, and of course Naguib Mahfouz. Later when he lived in Beirut, that other great literary center of the Arab world, he spent time with such poets as Tawfic Sayigh, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and Boland al-Haydari. He was already a close friend of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra from his college days at Cambridge, and later of another well-known Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani. In the 1960s he started an influential Arabic literary magazine, Aswat, which published the leading avant-garde writers of the time, and in 1967 he put together the first representative volume of short stories from the Arab world. Then he really put Arabic writing on the international literary map with the establishment of the Heinemann Arab Authors series. Since then he has continued to select and translate the best of Arabic fiction, most recently the classic novella by Yahya Hakki, The Lamp of Umm Hashim (AUC Press 2004). He has also translated three books of Islamic Hadith (with Ezzeddin Ibrahim) and other books of Islamic thought, and has written a large number of children's books of Middle Eastern history and folktales.

A Life between the Lines of Arabic Literature

Memories In Translation

متن الاربعين النووية في الاحاديث الصححية النبوية

The themes in this unusual collection of short stories range from the lost innocence of childhood, betrayal, greed and the battlefield of sex, to the courage of old age. The settings include desert wadis in the Arabian Gulf, a small Sudanese village, the packed streets of Cairo, and a sniper's alley in Beirut. The writing is fluid and compelling.

Fate of a Prisoner and Other Stories

The Anchor book of modern Arabic fiction

Sabine P. Moser

The king asks his daughters how much they love him and the answer of his third daughter greatly displeases him. Banished from her home she will later teach her father a valuable lesson when they meet again after many years.

The King and His Three Daughters

Struggling to feed his family, the woodcutter discovers a genie in a tree in the forest. The genie takes pity on the poor woodcutter, but his foolishness leads him into trouble over and over again. Will he ever learn?

The Woodcutter

A collection of fourteen tales about the folk hero Nasreddin Hoca, also known as Goha, a man with a reputation for being able to answer difficult questions in a clever way.

Goha, the wise fool

The stories in this volume show the writer's intimate knowledge of various parts of the Arab world. The title story deals with a film-maker who gets more than he bargained for in war-torn Beirut.

Open Season in Beirut and Other Stories

Stories from the Arab Past

Modern Arabic Short Stories. Selected and Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

Featuring the work of 79 outstanding writers from all over the Arabic-speaking world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, Syria in the north to Sudan in the south, this treasury of Arab voices is diverse in styles and concerns, but united by a common language. It spans the full history of modern Arabic literature, from its roots in western cultural influence at the end of the nineteenth century to the present-day flowering of Naguib Mahfouz's literary sons and daughters--From publisher description.

Muḥammad Bisāṭī

Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present. When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of history—his wife's sexual past, the war-torn lives of their families, and the personal allegiances of his friends and enemies. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mussad's wrath or to help Mussad track down and confront his nemesis. In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."

Denys Johnson-Davies

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