"Here, finally, is some writing with a genuine purchase on things of worth. The collection of pithy short stories, filled with a sad wonder, tells of contemporary Egyptians . . . timorously rebelling against the conformism of life along the Nile." —Observer ". . . Bakr emerges as a fine observer of her country's times, with a vision which remains, for all its engagement, quirky and distinctively personal." — Times Literary Supplement Set among the poor of contemporary Cairo, these thirteen stories and one short novella tell of women struggling to provide themselves with the basic necessities of life. They explore the limits of self-awareness, the pressures to conform, and some of the strange paths to escape that women resort to in a conservative society shot through with social and sexual prejudice and preconceptions.

One of the world's oldest recorded folktales tells the story of a handsome young man and the older woman in whose house he resides. Overcome by her feelings for him, the woman attempts to seduce him. When he turns her down she is enraged, and to her husband she accuses the young man of attacking her. The husband, seemingly convinced of his wife's innocence, has the young man punished. But it is precisely that punishment that leads to the hero's vindication and eventual rise to power and prominence. In the West we know this tale--classified in folklore as the Potiphar's Wife motif--from its vivid narration in the Hebrew Bible. But as Shalom Goldman demonstrates in this book, the Bible's is only one telling of a story that appears in the scriptures and folklore of many peoples and cultures, in many different eras, including ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and ancient Mesopotamia, as well as post-Biblical Jewish literature, the Qur'an, and Inuit culture. Goldman compares and contrasts the treatment of this motif especially in the literature and lore of the ancient Near East, Biblical Israel, and early Islam, at the same time touching on gender issues--the status of women in Middle Eastern societies and the varying constructions of male-female relationships--and the vexed question of "originality" in the narratives of the monotheistic traditions.

A new AUC Press edition from the author of The Man from Bashmour

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year: The first collection of short stories from the critically acclaimed, prize-winning author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour These eleven stories by Joshua Ferris, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, are at once thrilling, strange, and comic. The modern tribulations of marriage, ambition, and the fear of missing out as the temptations flow like wine and the minutes of life tick down are explored with the characteristic wit and insight that have made Ferris one of our most critically acclaimed novelists. Each of these stories burrows deep into the often awkward and hilarious misunderstandings that pass between strangers and lovers alike, and that turn ordinary lives upside down. Ferris shows to what lengths we mortals go to coax human meaning from our very modest time on earth, an effort that skews ever-more desperately in the direction of redemption. There's Arty Groys, the Florida retiree whose birthday celebration involves pizza, a prostitute, and a life-saving heart attack. There's Sarah, the Brooklynite whose shape-shifting existential dilemma is set in motion by a simple spring breeze. And there's Jack, a man so warped by past experience that he's incapable of having a normal social interaction with the man he hires to help him move out of storage. The stories in The Dinner Party are about lives changed forever when the reckless gives way to possibility and the ordinary cedes ground to mystery. And each one confirms Ferris's reputation as one of the most dazzlingly talented, deeply humane writers at work today.

Ruby Lavender has fun with her grandmother Miss Eula as they rescue chickens, paint a house pink and run their own secret post office. But what can Ruby dowhen Eula goes away?

The "wiles of women" are a timeless literary theme, treated from ancient Egyptian narratives to 21st-century TV series. The theme reaches its greatest flowering in the Islamic world, beginning with the Qur'an and inspiring entire literary traditions in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. The Wiles of Women as a Literary Genre is the first study devoted to the Turkish branch of the tradition. The book consists of three parts: (a) a narrative analysis that helps to define the stories as a literary genre, (b) a cultural analysis exploring the worldview beneath the stories, and (c) transliterations and English translations of 17 previously unavailable stories in Ottoman and Azeri Turkish. The genre is colorful and heterogeneous, with different stories viewing the wiles of women as evil and dangerous, as frivolous and amusing, or as thoughtful and instructive. Still, women are depicted by all stories as intrinsically and incorrigibly guileful. The same does not hold for men, who are granted moral agency and the capacity to learn from their mistakes. The outcome is a world that serves as a testing ground for men, with women as obstacles or at best mediators between men and a virtuous life. But in spite of this rigid frame, many stories employ humor and ambiguity-for instance by casting men in guileful roles-to grant a more nuanced view of social and gender relations.

The first of several works in Arabic to deal with the way in which an individual tries to come to terms with two divergent cultures Together with such figures as the scholar Taha Hussein, the playwright Tawfik al-Hakim, the short story writer Mahmoud Teymour and--of course--Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Hakki belongs to that distinguished band of early writers who, midway through the last century, under the influence of Western literature, began to practice genres of creative writing that were new to the traditions of classical Arabic. In the first story in this volume, the very short ''Story in the Form of a Petition, '' Yahya Hakki demonstrates his ease with gentle humor, a form rare in Arabic writing. In the following two stories, ''Mother of the Destitute'' and ''A Story from Prison, '' he describes with typical sympathy individuals who, less privileged than others, somehow manage to scrape through life's hardships. The latter story deals with the people of Upper Egypt, for whom the writer had a special understanding and affection. It is, however, for the title story (in fact, more of a novella) of this collection that the writer is best known. Recounting the difficulties faced by a young man who is sent to England to study medicine and who then returns to Egypt to pit his new ideals against tradition, ''The Lamp of Umm Hashim'' was the first of several works in Arabic to deal with the way in which an individual tries to come to terms with two divergent cultures.

There were three distinct stages in the evolution of Annette Brougham's attitude towards the knocking in the room above. In the beginning it had been merely a vague discomfort. Absorbed in the composition of her waltz she had heard it almost subconsciously.