One of Egypt's greatest contemporary writers, Gamal al-Ghitani (1945-2015) was born into a family of modest means in the Egyptian countryside. He trained as a carpet maker before turning his attention to writing, publishing over a dozen novels and several collections of short stories. This haunting memoir, one of seven autobiographical "notebooks" written before Ghitani's death, weaves together a series of vignettes in a style that mimics the uneven, discontinuous nature of memory itself. These fragments, or traces, are summoned from across the span of a singular lifetime, from Ghitani's rural birthplace in Upper Egypt to Cairo, to the Arab world and beyond. We read of his childhood adventures, his erotic awakenings, his time as a political prisoner, and his reports from the battlefront in Iraq and the corridors of power in Syria. There are vivid passages that capture fleeting glances of strangers through car windows, flavors and scents of delicacies he still savored, dreams and sorrows of neighbors in the apartment blocks of Cairo before Nasser, as well as recollections of chance conversations at points of transit, in cafes and on elegant streets, and trysts with unnamed paramours. These memories, and Ghitani's musings on memory's own finitude and mutability, make Traces both memoir and a meditation on memory itself, in all its inscrutable workings and inevitable betrayals.

Upon returning from a trip abroad, the author-narrator learns that his father has died during his absence. Crushed with grief and guilt, he begins a journey of discovery of self and existence. Beset by doubts and at times despair, he almost gives up, but then is granted the priceless gift of appearing before the mythical-mystical Diwan, the council that oversees all affairs of this world, keeping a record of everything that has ever happened or existed and righting wrongs past and present. With the guidance of the Great Master, the Prophet's grandson al-Husayn, he is able to witness events of his father's life, his own life, and that of his beleaguered country as he progresses through Sufi states and stations. Granted the ability to be in several places and various eras simultaneously, the narrator is able to bring together heroes and villains and great events and debacles in Egypt's and all of Islam's history. Alternating scenes depict the historical martyrdom of al-Husayn in Karbala, and a fantastical confrontation between two camps fighting over the soul of Egypt: in one camp we meet President Gamal Abdel Nasser, al-Husayn, the narrator's own father, and a ragtag army of valiant but ill-equipped Egyptians in combat with one led by Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin. This surrealist novel with political and mystical overtones and an edge of satire reveals one of Egypt's greatest living writers at his finest.

For Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo has always been a place of special resonance. As the place in which he was born and has lived his whole life, it is a city he loves passionately and has visited and revisited in his writing. It is the setting for nearly all his novels and short stories, not merely as a backdrop but as an integral part of his fiction, playing its own role in the dramas. The old streets of the Cairo Trilogy and the microcosmic cul-de-sac of Midaq Alley become fictional characters as fascinating as the human ones for Naguib Mahfouz. A longtime admirer of the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, photographer Britta Le Va discovered old Cairo through his works. Here, she guides us through his pages, and treads his streets and alleys, to produce a collection of outstanding visual images of the historic city. Each complements a verbal image selected from Mahfouz's writings. In his introduction, novelist Gamal al-Ghitani describes a walking tour with the great man around the streets of Gamaliya, that historic heart of the old city where both of them--more than thirty years apart--were born and grew up. Along the way, Mahfouz reminisces and remarks on what had changed and what had not in eight decades.

This is a unique and surprising photographic presentation that invites us to look and think again about what we are seeing. In "Re:viewing Egypt", Xavier Roy's breathtaking photographs of Egypt offer us a haunting vision of a country and its people. They are also a lesson in the art of photography itself, inviting us to experience images as metaphor, to extend our notions of reality. Roy draws us into Egypt's mystique, its scintillating waters, bucolic vistas, ruins, and places of worship. We observe the correspondences of shape and texture, perspective and repetition, light and shadow, and the vitality in the mundane and commonplace. A photograph of an acacia tree is juxtaposed with one of birds in flight, their formation and movement echoing the outline and feather-like aspect of the tree. The sea, both formless and metallic, can be an expression of the emotions of the woman who looks at it, or an image of ambivalence and uncertainty, of life and death. Each photograph is at once an offer of tranquility and a call to interpret. Gamal al-Ghitani's profoundly contemplative introduction is both inspiring and inspired by Roy's gallery of one hundred images, compelling us to observe Egypt's riches not as passive onlookers, but as engaged, reflective beings.