The Essential Yusuf Idris: Masterpieces of the Egyptian Short Story

A carefully curated collection of short story masterpieces from the "genius of the short story" (Tawfiq al-Hakim) and the Arab world's greatest short-story writer of the twentieth century, now available in paperback''Like the Russian aristocrats of Chekhov, the provincial bourgeoisie of Flaubert, or the Ibo villagers of Achebe, Idris raises his authentic characters into convincing types within their context: he makes us live their agonies and hopes.''-Ferial GhazoulYusuf Idris (1927-91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story.He studied and practiced medicine, but his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle, and in writing-and his writing, whether in his regular newspaper columns or in his fiction, often reflected his political convictions.He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature more than once, and when the prize went