“I have found that obedience and conformity in the United States are not strictly enforced or heavily guarded by armed soldiers or prisons, instead they present as a whisper, a sound vibration that crashes into your consciousness where they transform into ants that proceed to slowly and gradually eat away at your insides until they ultimately deform you after which they proceed to build you back up and mold you into what the system determines what you should become.”
Read moreFriday Finds: Ahmed Naji, ‘Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison’
“Around a century later, in Cairo, during the obscenity trial of my novel Using Life, the assistant attorney for the prosecution challenged my defense attorney and the respected literary figures we had called as witnesses to read a section of my novel out loud.”
Read moreFriday Finds: ‘A Rot of Evidence’
“I thought these are crazy days. I have been in prison for a long time, and I have no idea what’s going on. Maybe they’re fabricating a case against Nagib Mahfouz or his ghost.”
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Extend Your Summer with the New ArabLit Quarterly: The Sea
Includes the perfect hot-and-sweet late-summer story from Muhammad al-Hajj, in pitch-perfect translation by Yasmine Zohdi.
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Egyptian Novelist Ahmed Naji and Editor Tarek al-Taher Will Go Back to Court in ‘Public Morals’ Case
As Naji wrote on Facebook: We’ll start again from scratch and reinvent the wheel in order to explain what’s creative freedom and what’s literature again.
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What’s the Real Nature of Ahmed Naji’s Novel ‘The Use of Life’?
Ahmed Naji will have to appear in court November 14 to defend the sixth chapter of his novel, ‘The Use of Life.’ What’s it really all about?
Read moreEgypt’s Blog-to-Book Phenomenon: Positive or Negative for Arabic Book World?
Journalist and blogger Ahmed Naji has out a new book, Blogs From Post to Tweet. According to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, which is making printed copies available […]
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