Assorted books or authors in one topic
Feb 24th, 2015, 9:16 pm
13 novels by Naguib Mahfouz
Requirements: ePUB & PDF Reader, 15.4 MB + 8.6 MB
Overview: NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (1911-2006) was an Egyptian novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. The prize citation praised Mahfouz "who, through works rich in nuance—now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous—has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind."
Genre: Fiction > Literature

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1. AKHENATEN
Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king"—and the first known monotheistic ruler—whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death—including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti—in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court.

2. BEFORE THE THRONE
Before the Throne calls forth a parade of those who have shaped the modern nation of Egypt—from the ruler who first unified Egypt in 3000 BC to Anwar Sadat, the president assassinated by religious extremists in 1981, and including figures as various as the famous pharaoh Ramesses II and the medieval vizier Qaraqush. As they defend their decisions under questioning by Osiris, Isis, and Horus, those who acted for the nation’s good are honored with immortality in paradise while those who failed to protect it are condemned either to the inferno or to “the place of insignificance.” Full of Mahfouz’s unique insight into his country’s timeless qualities, this provocative work skillfully traces five thousand years of Egypt’s past as it flows into the turbulent present.

3. CAIRO MODERN
Cairo of the 1930s is a place of vast social and economic inequities. It is also a time of change, when the universities have just opened to women and heady new philosophies imported from Europe are stirring up debates among the young. Mahgub is a fiercely proud student who is determined to keep both his poverty and his lack of principles secret from his idealistic friends. When he finds that there are no jobs for those without connections, out of desperation he agrees to participate in an elaborate deception. But what begins as a mere strategy for survival soon becomes much more for both Mahgub and his partner in crime, an equally desperate young woman named Ihsan. As they make their way through Cairo's lavish high society their precarious charade begins to unravel and the terrible price of Mahgub's Faustian bargain becomes clear.

4. THE DAY THE LEADER WAS KILLED
The time is 1981, Anwar al-Sadat is president, and Egypt is lurching into the modern world. Set against this backdrop, The Day the Leader Was Killed relates the tale of a middle-class Cairene family. Rich with irony and infused with political undertones, the story is narrated alternately by the pious and mischievous family patriarch Muhtashimi Zayed, his hapless grandson Elwan, and Elwan's headstrong and beautiful fiancee Randa. The novel reaches its climax with the assassination of Sadat on October 6, 1981, an event around which the fictional plot is skillfully woven.

5. KHAN AL-KHALILI
The time is 1942, World War II is at its height, and the Africa Campaign is raging along the northern coast of Egypt. Against this backdrop, Mahfouz’s novel tells the story of the Akifs, a middle-class family that has taken refuge in Cairo’s colorful and bustling Khan al-Khalili neighborhood. Believing that the German forces will never bomb such a famously religious part of the city, they leave their more elegant neighborhood and seek safety among the crowded alleyways, busy cafés, and ancient mosques of the Khan. Through the eyes of Ahmad, the eldest Akif son, Mahfouz presents a richly textured vision of the Khan, and of a crisis that pits history against modernity and faith against secularism.

6. THE MIRAGE
The Mirage is the story of an intense young man who has been so dominated by his mother that her death sets him dangerously adrift in a world he cannot manage alone. Kamil Ru’ba is a tortured soul who hopes that writing the story of his life will help him gain control of it. Raised by a mother who fled her abusive husband and became overbearingly possessive and protective toward her young son, he has long been isolated emotionally and physically. Now in his twenties, Kamil seeks to escape her posthumous grasp. Finding and successfully courting the woman of his dreams seems to promise salvation, until his ignorance of mature love and his fear and jealousy lead to tragedy.

7. MORNING AND EVENING TALK
Set in Cairo, Morning and Evening Talk traces three related families from the arrival of Napoleon to the 1980s, through short character sketches arranged in alphabetical order. This highly experimental device produces a kind of biographical dictionary, whose individual entries come together to paint a vivid portrait of life in Cairo from a range of perspectives. The characters include representatives of every class and human type and as the intricate family saga unfolds, a powerful picture of a society in transition emerges. This is a tale of change and continuity, of the death of a traditional way of life and the road to independence and beyond, seen through the eyes of Egypt's citizens.

8. RHADOPIS OF NUBIA
While the ravishing courtesan Rhadopis is bathing, a falcon lifts one of her golden sandals and drops it into the lap of the Pharaoh Merenra II. Upon hearing Rhadopis described as “beauty itself,” the young pharaoh decides to return Rhadopis’s sandal himself. When the two meet, they are immediately seized by a passion far stronger than their ability to resist. Thus begins a love affair that makes them the envy of Egyptian society. But blinded by their love and the extravagant attentions they lavish on each other, they ignore the growing resentment of the world around them in this extraordinary tale of star-crossed love.

9. THEBES AT WAR
Thebes at War tells of a high point in Egyptian history—ancient Egypt’s defeat of Asiatic foreigners who had dominated northern Egypt for two hundred years. With a visit from a court official and a provocative insult, the southern pharaoh’s long simmering resentment boils over, leading him to commit himself and his heirs to an epic struggle for the throne. Filled with the grand clash of armies, staggering defeats, daring escapes, and glorious victories, and written at a time when Egypt was again under the sway of foreign powers, Thebes at War is a resounding call to remember Egypt’s long and noble history.

10. THREE NOVELS OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Three magnificent novels—Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War—that form an ancient-Egyptian counterpart to his famous Cairo Trilogy.

11. PALACE WALK [Cairo Trilogy I] (PDF)
Mahfouz's most famous work, the epic Cairo Trilogy, traces three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. The first volume introduces us to Al-Sayyid Ahmad's gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons—the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal.

12. PALACE OF DESIRE [Cairo Trilogy II] (PDF)
Al-Sayyid Ahmad's rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in this volume, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s.

13. SUGAR STREET [Cairo Trilogy III] (PDF)
The final volume of the trilogy brings Mahfouz's vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician.


Download Instructions:
#1-10 (ePUBs): (Closed Filehost) (Closed Filehost) http://www.mafiastorage.com/670e124b4e9a0b84
#11-13 (PDFs): (Closed Filehost) (Closed Filehost) http://www.mafiastorage.com/980aa3384afade3d

Mirror(s):
#1-10 (ePUBs): https://userscloud.com/ykymvl30nv2u
#11-13 (PDFs): https://userscloud.com/y2ekk6yt6fip
Feb 24th, 2015, 9:16 pm

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