In Arabs and the Art of Storytelling, the eminent Moroccan literary historian and critic Kilito revisits and reassesses, in a modern critical light, many traditional narratives of the Arab world. He brings to such celebrated texts as A Thousand and One Nights, Kalila and Dimna, and Kitab al-Bukhala' refreshing and iconoclastic insight, giving new life to classic stories that are often treated as fossilized and untouchable cultural treasures. For Arab scholars and readers, poetry has for centuries taken precedence, overshadowing narrative as a significant literary genre. Here, Kilito demonstrates the key role narrative has played in the development of Arab belles lettres and moral philosophy. His urbane style has earned him a devoted following among specialists and general readers alike, making this translation aninvaluable contribution to an English-speaking audience.

One of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of the Year Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category Fifty rogue's tales translated fifty ways An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature. Impostures follows the roguish Abu Zayd al-Saruji in his adventures around the medieval Middle East-we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English. Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation. An English-only edition.

One of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of the Year Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category Fifty rogue's tales translated fifty ways An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature. Impostures follows the roguish Abu Zayd al-Saruji in his adventures around the medieval Middle East-we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English. Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation. An English-only edition.

Maqamat Abi Zayd al-Saruji is a scholarly, Arabic-only edition of the celebrated work by al-Hariri, which is also available in English translation from the Library of Arabic Literature as Impostures. Al-Hariri's text consists of fifty stories about the adventures of the itinerant con man and master of persuasion Abu Zayd al-Saruji, as told by the equally itinerant and often gullible narrator al-Harith ibn Hammam. Al-Hariri was a virtuoso writer of the rhymed prose narrative genre known as the maqamah, which would continue as a popular literary form into the twentieth century. An Arabic edition with an Arabic foreword and English scholarly apparatus.

It has been said that the difference between and language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army. Both the act of translation and bilingualism are steeped in a tension between surrender and conquest, yielding conscious and unconscious effects on language. First published in 2002, Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shall Not Speak My Language explores this tension in his address of the dynamics of literary influence and canon formation within the Arabic literary tradition. As one of the Arab world's most original and provocative literary critics, Kilito challenges the reader to reexamine contemporary notions of translation, bilingualism, postcoloniality, and the discipline of comparative literature. Wail S. Hassan's superb translation makes Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language available to an English audience for the first time, capturing the charm and elegance of the original in a chaste and seemingly effortless style. At the center of Kilito's work, is his insistence on the ethics of translation. He explores the effects of translation on the genres of poetry, narrative prose, and philosophy. Kilito highlights the problem of cultural translation as an interpretive process, and as an essential element of comparative literary studies. In close readings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Rushd, al-Saffar, and al-Shidyaq, among others, he traces the shifts in attitude toward language and translation from the centuries of Arab cultural ascendancy to the contemporary period, interrogating along the way how the dynamics of power mediate literary encounters across cultural, linguistic, and political lines.