Youssef Rakha

ولكن قلبي

بيروت شي محل

كتاب الطغرى

التماسيح

Yūsuf Rakhā

Youssef Rakha's groundbreaking first novel was published just after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in 2011. It's hard to imagine a debut of greater urgency or more thrilling innovation. The Book of the Sultan's Seal is made up of nine chapters, each centered on a drive our hero, Mustafa Corbaci, takes around greater Cairo-city of post-9/11 Islam. In a series of visions, Corbaci encounters the spirit of the last Ottoman sultan and embarks on a mission the sultan assigns him. Corbaci's trials shed light on the contemporary Arab Muslim's desperation for a sense of identity: Sultan's Seal is both a suspenseful, erotic, riotous novel and an examination of accounts of Muslim demise. The way to a renaissance, Corbaci's journeys lead us to see, may have less to do with dogma and jihad than with love poetry, calligraphy, and the cultural diversity and richness within Islam. Rakha's groundbreaking first novel is now finally in English, ready to astonish new readers around the world.

Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars

Book of the Sultan's Seal

Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha’s provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo.

A Novel

The Crocodiles

Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy

Youssef Rakha

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