A surprising and delightful departure from his much-loved fiction, Mahfouz's brilliant collection of autobiographical reflections offers a crowning touch to the Nobel Prize laureate's long and distinguished literary career.

From the Foreword by Nadine Gordimer: "These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are--in the words of the title of one of the prose pieces--'The Dialogue of the Late Afternoon' of his life. I don't believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have matched what we have here." With more than 500,000 copies of his books in print, Naguib Mahfouz has established a following of readers for whom Echoes of an Autobiography provides a unique opportunity to catch an intimate glimpse into the life and mind of this magnificent storyteller. Here, in his first work of nonfiction ever to be published in the United States, Mahfouz considers the myriad perplexities of existence, including preoccupations with old age, death, and life's transitory nature. A surprising and delightful departure from his bestselling and much-loved fiction, this unusual and thoughtful book is breathtaking evidence of the fact that Naguib Mahfouz is not only a "storyteller of the first order" (Vanity Fair), but also a profound thinker of the first order.

This amazing epic spans fifty years, four continents, three wars, and the multiple identities of one man who had to adapt to survive. As a little boy he endured the holocaust, from shootings on the bloody banks of the Danube to a frustrated rescue attempt by Raoul Wallenberg. From unprecendented stardom in the theater to abandonment on the streets of a strange land, combat in the desert, unprecedented success in foreign lands, and a tender and profound love story, this an inspiring saga for all people. www.ivangabor.com

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The Mahfouz Dialogs records the memories, views, and jokes of Naguib Mahfouz on subjects ranging from politics to the relationship between his novels and his life, as delivered to intimate friends at a series of informal meetings stretching out over almost half a century. Mahfouz was a pivotal figure not only in world literature (through being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win a mass audience), but also in his own society, where he vastly enhanced the image of the writer in the eyes of the public and encapsulated--as the victim of a savage attack on his life by an Islamist in 1994--the struggle between pluralism, tolerance, and secularism on the one hand and extremist Islam. Moderated by Gamal al-Ghitani, a writer of a younger generation who shared a common background with Mahfouz (al-Ghitani also grew up in medieval Cairo) and felt a vast personal empathy for the writer despite their sometimes different views, these exchanges throw new light on Mahfouz's life, the creation of his novels, and literary Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.

In April 1945, British troops liberated the camp, and Mira was eventually reunited with her father. Most of the other members of her family had perished.