"Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of his fiction."-- "Los Angeles Times Book Review"

Recounted dreams often baffle and bore. Mahfouz, a prose artist to the end, cuts and compresses. Sad, strange, comic (often all at once), these mosaic shards build into an elusive pattern... They never quite fuse into a single story. Something in them resists translation from night into day, just as Diana Matar's intriguingly shaded, cropped and angled photos tempt us with the promise of a narrative -- and deny it. We learn that private experience, asleep or awake, will always escape its interpretations. Both words and images guard their mystery.--Boyd Tonkin "Financial Times"

"The Arab world's foremost novelist."-- "The New York Times"

"A towering literary figure."-- "The Economist"

"A master of both detailed realism and fabulous storytelling."-- "The Guardian"

"Mahfouz is a storyteller of the first order in any idiom."-- "Vanity Fair"

"The incredible variety of Naguib Mahfouz's writings continues to dazzle our eyes."-- "The Washington Post"

A dream journal kept by Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz in the last years of his life reveals poetry and mystery in brief, enigmatic bursts... As suggested in the introduction by Hisham Matar and underscored by evocative photographs by Diana Matar, the more constant presence throughout this book may be the city of Cairo.--Brendan Driscoll "Booklist"

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation

Pub date: 2025-06-03

Length: 160 pages