Cairo: Tales of the City

by John Miller (Editor), Kirsten Miller (Editor), Naguib Mahfouz

'The night scene in the city is very striking for its vastness and loneliness. Everybody has gone to rest long before ten o'clock. There are no lights in the enormous buildings; only the stars blazing above, with their astonishing brilliancy, in the blue, peaceful sky.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1994

About the author

John Miller has edited a number of intriguing anthologies for Chronicle Books, including Lust and White Rabbit. He runs Big Fish Books, a packaging company in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book designers as book editors? Not a good idea. Nicely packaged, but it's a mash up of anything-they-could-find on the subject of Cairo. Some interesting stories from Egyptian writers interspersed with some pretty horrendous stuff from the "white man's burden" school of writing. The lead off with Rudyard Kipling should have been a clue, and the letters from T.E. Lawrence were just pedestrian notes home, and gave nothing of the atmosphere or Cairo.
What raised it for me above the one-star level was the chance to be introduced to new writers, since I know nothing of Arabic writing.

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vignettes about Cairo from several authors. It was a quick read. I enjoyed it as I had been to Cairo in December 2001 and could relate to some of the stories.

[Vari Lemur · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hit and miss, with some interesting stories and some really boring ones.