Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives presents an intricate exploration into the life and literary universe of Mohamed Choukri, a towering figure in 20th-century Moroccan literature. Known primarily for his groundbreaking autobiographical work "al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī" (For Bread Alone), Choukri's literary influence extends well beyond this single work. This book seeks to cast a light on his broader body of work, examining the cultural, societal, and personal influences that shaped his unique storytelling style. Through a deep analysis of his narratives, this text aims to unfold how Choukri portrayed the harsh realities he and others encountered, giving voice to the marginalized individuals and communities in Morocco.

A street hood in Tangier decides belatedly to obtain an education. The novel describes him juggling his two lives, sitting in a classroom during the day, hustling in bars and brothels at night. By the author of For Bread Alone.

"As I read Choukrirs"s notes, I saw and heard Jean Genet as clearly as if I had been watching a film of him. To achieve such precision simply by reporting what happened and what was said, one must have a rare clarity of vision."-From William Burroughsrs" introduction to Jean Genet in TangierTangier, "the most extraordinary and mysterious city in the world," according to Mohamed Choukri, was a haven for many Western writers in the early twentieth century. Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, and Tennessee Williams all spent time there, and all were befriended by Choukri.Collected here together for the first time in English are Choukrirs"s delightful recollections of these encounters, offering a truly fresh insight into the lives of these cult figures.The sights and sounds of 1970s Tangier are brought vividly alive, as are the larger-than-life characters of these extraordinary men, through ordinary everyday events.ls"What Yacoubi would really like is a complete harem,rs" I said. We laughed. ls"One handsome boy is enough for me,rs" said Tennessee. ls"A boy who just happens by.rs" ls"So you donrs"t want a harem?rs" I said. ls"No. Harems are always very tiring. Theyrs"re no fun.rs"Mohamed Choukri (19352003) is one of North Africars"s most controversial and widely read authors. After a childhood of poverty and petty crime, Choukri learned to read and write at the age of twenty. He then became a teacher and writer, finally being awarded the chair of Arabic literature at Ibn Batuta College in Tangier. His works include For Bread Alone and Streetwise (both available from Telegram).

Considered one of Morocco’s most important contemporary writers, Muhammad Zafzaf created stories of alterity, compassionate tales inhabited by prostitutes, thieves, and addicts living in the margins of society. In The Elusive Fox, Zafzaf’s first novel to be translated into English, a young teacher visits the coastal city of Essaouira in the 1960s. There he meets a group of European bohemians and local Moroccans and is exposed to the grittier side of society. More than a novel, The Elusive Fox is a portrait of a city during a time of fluid cultural and political mores in Morocco.

The complete short stories of acclaimed Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri, translated into English and collected in one volume for the first time Mohamed Choukri’s vivid stories invite the reader to wander the streets of Tangier, the ancient coastal crossroads between Europe and Africa, and to meet its denizens at markets, beaches, cafés, and brothels. Choukri’s Tangier is a place where newborns are for sale, swindlers hawk the Prophet’s shoes, and boys collect trash to sell for food. Choukri says that “writing is a protest, not a parade.” And in these thirty-one stories he privileges the voices of those ignored by society: the abused, the abandoned, the addicted. The tales are at once vibrant local vignettes and profound reflections on the lives, sufferings, and hopes of Choukri’s fellow Tangerines.

In recent years, the field of literary studies at the international level has become more involved in the analysis of the so-called industrial literature, a literary genre that focuses on the literary representation of factory work and workers’ alienation. This book engages in the ongoing debate by offering a narratological analysis of Italian industrial novels in particular, while taking into consideration their paratexts and interrogating the possibility of the presence of a testimonial intent in the text. The study reconstructs the connections between visions of factory utopias and Italian industrial literature, starting with an overview of said visions of utopia and how they came into being in Europe following the industrial revolution. It then proceeds by exploring the relationship between the twentieth-century Italian entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti and Italian industrial authors, and the influence that Olivetti’s visions of factory utopia had on these writers and how they perceived themselves as witnesses of factory life and workers’ alienation. In analyzing these texts, and particularly the novels by Paolo Volponi and Ottiero Ottieri, the book focuses on the previously overlooked representation of the self in industrial literature and on how this self expresses the need for testimony.

Nonbelievers, Apostates, and Atheists in the Muslim World offers a contemporary, cross-cultural look at nonbelief and nonreligion in Islam. Providing historical, conceptual, statistical, and ethnographic data on nonbelievers from Morocco to Egypt, Turkey, and Bangladesh, it explores the unique nature and challenges of nonreligion for Muslims. It includes 11 chapters by experts on nonbelief, nonreligion, and atheism in an array of Muslim-majority countries. The book features multiple disciplines and offers both ethnographic and statistical information on this important, growing, but neglected population. It explores the unique nature of nonreligion in Islam, illustrating that nonbelief is specific to a particular religious tradition. It also examines how ex-Muslims navigate complexities and dangers of their societies—especially for women—and how nonbelief and nonreligion do not equate to atheism or the total repudiation of religion or of Muslim identity. This book is an outstanding resource for scholars and students of nonbelief, atheism, secularism, religion, and contemporary Islam.

The stories collected here are by leading authors of the short story form in the Middle East today. In addition to works by writers already wellknown in the West, such as Idwar al-Kharrat, Fu'ad al-Takarli and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, the collection includes stories by key authors whose fame has hitherto been restricted to the Middle East. This bilingual reader is ideal for students of Arabic as well as lovers of literature who wish to broaden their appreciation of the work of Middle Eastern writers. The collection features stories in the original Arabic, accompanied by an English translation and a brief author biography, as well as a discussion of context and background. Each story is followed by a glossary and discussion of problematic language points.

Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903–1929 focuses on fifty-three silent film adaptations of the novels of acclaimed authors George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton. Many of the films are unknown or dismissed, and most of them are degraded, destroyed, or lost—burned in warehouse fires, spontaneously combusted in storage cans, or quietly turned to dust. Their content and production and distribution details are reconstructed through archival resources as individual narratives that, when considered collectively, constitute a broader narrative of lost knowledge—a fragmented and buried early twentieth-century story now reclaimed and retold for the first time to a twenty-first-century audience. This collective narrative also demonstrates the extent to which the adaptations are intertextually and ideologically entangled with concurrently released early “woman’s films” to re-promote and re-instill the norm of idealized white, married, domesticated womanhood during a time of extraordinary cultural change for women. Retelling this lost narrative also allows for a reassessment of the place and function of the adaptations in the development of the silent film industry and as cinematic precedent for the hundreds of sound adaptations of the literary texts of these eight women writers produced from 1931 to the 2020s.