First published in 1966, Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile is an atmospheric novel that dramatizes the rootlessness of Egypt’s cosmopolitan middle class. Anis Zani is a bored and drug-addicted civil servant who is barely holding on to his job. Every evening he hosts a gathering on a houseboat on the Nile, where he and a motley group of cynical and aimless friends share a water pipe full of kif, a mixture of tobacco and marijuana. When a young female journalist—an “alarmingly serious person”—joins them and begins secretly documenting their activities, the group’s harmony starts disintegrating, culminating in a midnight joyride that ends in tragedy.

This moving and perceptive story centres upon a group of disaffected middle-class Cairenes who gather on a house-boat on the River Nile every evening to smoke kif, drink, and discuss politics. Their host is an addict, so dependent that he is in danger of losing his job. One evening they venture out for a drive which ends in tragedy, destroying their easy camaraderie and exposing the frailty of human relationships. In his elegant but economic prose, Mahfouz once again creates - out of the simplest of plots - a telling commentary on human nature.

Rosemary Mahoney was determined to take a solo trip down the Egyptian Nile in a small boat, even though civil unrest and vexing local traditions conspired to create obstacles every step of the way. Starting off in the south, she gained the unlikely sympathy and respect of a Muslim sailor, who provided her with both a seven-foot skiff and a window into the culturally and materially impoverished lives of rural Egyptians. Egyptian women don't row on the Nile, and tourists aren't allowed to for safety's sake. Mahoney endures extreme heat during the day, and a terror of crocodiles while alone in her boat at night. Whether she's confronting deeply held beliefs about non-Muslim women, finding connections to past chroniclers of the Nile, or coming to the dramaticm realization that fear can engender unwarranted violence, Rosemary Mahoney's informed curiosity about the world, her glorious prose, and her wit never fail to captivate.

A group of urban Egyptian hipsters debates secularism and "fundamentalism" with tragic consequences. Cast of 4 women and 6 men.

In this provocative and dreamy parable, a young man disillusioned by the corruption of his homeland sets out on a quest to find Gebel, the land of perfection, from which no one has ever returned. On his way, Ibn Fattouma passes through a series of very different lands--realms where the moon is worshipped, where marriage does not exist, where kings are treated like gods, and where freedom, toleration, and justice are alternately held as the highest goods. All of these places, however, are inevitably marred by the specter of war, and Ibn Fattouma finds himself continually driven onward, ever seeking. Like the protagonists of A Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels, Naguib Mahfouz's hero travels not through any recognizable historical landscape, but through timeless aspects of human possibility.

Arabic fiction.

With a writing career spanning some seventy years, Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most recognized writers in the world. His study of philosophy at what is now Cairo University greatly influenced his works, as did his wide readings and his work in the government and in the Cinema Organization. Life's Wisdom is a unique collection of quotations selected from the great author's works, offering philosophical insights on themes such as childhood, youth, love, marriage, war, freedom, death, the supernatural, the afterlife, the soul, immortality, and many other subjects that take us through life's journey. Naguib Mahfouz's works abound with words of wisdom. As Nadine Gordimer states in her foreword to his Echoes of an Autobiography: "The essence of a writer's being is in the work, not the personality, though the world values things otherwise, and would rather see what the writer looks like on television than read where he or she really is to be found: in the writings." In keeping with Gordimer's comment, Mahfouz's true nature can be found in his writing. The quotations included here offer a broad, yet profound, insight into the writer's philosophy gained through a life's journey of experience and writing.