Whispers of the Stars

“When his daughter, Umm Kulthum, gave me a small box containing several papers belonging to Mahfouz, I felt a thrill as if I were about to discover a pharaonic tomb… Among the papers was a complete file… containing about 40 short stories, but the stories were not published at the time they were written… Mahfouz returned to them years later to publish them in the magazine Nisf al-Donia… Eighteen short stories remained outside the various editions of the complete works.” (Introduced by Muhammad Sha’ir) These stories take place in “the neighborhood,” Mahfouz’s beloved, vibrant world. Their heroes include bullies, astrologers, possessive people, saints, fugitives, sheikhs who monitor and interfere in the affairs of the neighborhood and the lives of its residents, and imams of religious zawiyas… Faces and masks that conceal much more. Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was an Egyptian novelist and writer. He is the only Arab to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.