Egyptian Novelists Go Back to the Drawing Board

I’ve had to go back to square zero with an essay-review about Egyptian fiction that I’d thought was nearly finished. But it didn’t occur to my apparently blinkered brain that this will be true for many authors with much longer and more serious projects.

Not that anyone’s complaining!

From Ahmed Alaidy (author of Being Abbas al-Abd, translated by Humphrey Davies and published by AUC Press), writing in The Washington Post:

I had been working on a novel about a future revolution, picturing the day the people finally went against the regime. I imagined crowds, how the regime would provoke people and how the people would snap, step by step. Pure fiction.

I will have to rewrite it.

Also, in the LA Times blog: Alaa al-Aswany “vows” to write a book about the uprising.

Bookstores in Cairo are re-opening: Alef has resumed limited hours, Bookspot in Ma’adi has also re-opened. Kotob Khan in New Ma’adi posted a message that all previously scheduled events have been postponed.