Includes bibliographical references (p.477-486).

From "No one sleeps in Alexandria/ Ibrahim Abdel Meguid" -- Ya Khabiir/ Mohammad Abdul-Wali -- Rhythms in slow time/ Yahya Taher Abdullah -- The disconnected/ Leila Abouzeid -- Dreams seen by a blind boy/ Yusuf Abu Rayya -- From "Dongola/ Idris Ali" -- The doctor's prescription/ Daisy Al-Amir -- I saw the date-palms/ radwa Ashour -- The little girl in green, from "Nile Sparrows/ Ibrahim Aslan" -- From "The Yacoubian building/ Alaa Al Aswany" -- From " A land of stone and thyme/ Liana Badr" -- From " a certain woman/ Hala El Badry" -- Dotty Noona, from "The golden chariot/ Salwa Bakr" -- From " The tiller of waters/ Hoda Barakat" -- Life by installments/ Mohammed Barrada -- Drought, from "Clamor of the lake/ Mohamed El-Bistaie" -- Flower crazy/ Mohamed Choukri -- From "Dear Mr. Kawabata/ Rashid al-Daif" -- from " The hostage/ Zayd Mutee' Dammaj"....

The new anthology of the range of Arabic ficton in English translation, compiled by the man described by Edward Said as " the leading Arabic-English translator of our time", samples the novels and short stories of seventy-niine writers from Morocco to Iraq, from 1930's to 2000s. Denys Johnson-Davis has himself produced more than twenty-five volumes of translation from modern Arabic literature, and has followed the progress of this movement from its earliest days when its foundations were laid down by such authors as Taha Hussain, Tawfik al-Hakim, Yahya Hakki, and others in Egypt and similar figures in other parts of the Arab world. He was the first to translate Naguib Mahfouz and introduced the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih to the world. The short stories and extracts from novels in this this anthology range from the experimental to the masterful, from fantasy to social realism and give the reader the broadest possible picture of the state of Arabic writing society.--BOOK JACKET.