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Reading the City: A City in Short Fiction
The Book of Cairo: A City in Short Fiction
A corrupt police officer trawls the streets of Cairo on the most important assignment of his career: the answer to the truth of all existence…
A young journalist struggles over the obituary of a nightclub dancer…
A man slowly loses his mind in one of the city’s new desert developments...
There is a saying that, whoever you are, if you come to Cairo you will find a hundred people just like you. For over a thousand years, the city on the banks of the Nile has welcomed travellers from around the world. But in recent years Cairo has also been a stage for expressions of short-lived hope, political disappointments and a violent repression that can barely be written about.
These ten short stories showcase some of the most exciting, emerging voices in Egypt, guiding us through one of the world’s largest and most historic cities as it is today – from its slums to its villas, its bars and its balconies, through its infamous traffic. Appearing in English for the first time, these stories evoke the sadness and loss of the modern city, as well as its humour and beauty.
A young journalist struggles over the obituary of a nightclub dancer…
A man slowly loses his mind in one of the city’s new desert developments...
There is a saying that, whoever you are, if you come to Cairo you will find a hundred people just like you. For over a thousand years, the city on the banks of the Nile has welcomed travellers from around the world. But in recent years Cairo has also been a stage for expressions of short-lived hope, political disappointments and a violent repression that can barely be written about.
These ten short stories showcase some of the most exciting, emerging voices in Egypt, guiding us through one of the world’s largest and most historic cities as it is today – from its slums to its villas, its bars and its balconies, through its infamous traffic. Appearing in English for the first time, these stories evoke the sadness and loss of the modern city, as well as its humour and beauty.
112 pages, Paperback
First published May 16, 2019
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420 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 1, 2023
“ … intimate views of life, tinged with satire, surrealism, and humour”
When I booked a trip to Cairo, my first international post-Covid trip in almost three bleak stay-at-home years, I wanted a book that would give me a feel for the city and some small understanding of what makes it tick. I was searching for a book that would treat Cairo in a manner and with a level of importance that would effectively elevate the city itself to the level of a character in the story.
I had hopes but THE BOOK OF CAIRO was not that book!
In fact, far from providing any insights into Cairo’s nature, the stories in THE BOOK OF CAIRO rarely stray far out of the mental headspace of the narrators of the individual stories. They are little more than a collection of short-lived glimpses into the ruminations of a handful of Arabic men simply going about their daily lives and thinking their daily thoughts. And, lest my comment be misunderstood, I’ll rush to say that the stories, English translations from a handful of Egyptian authors, are definitely clever and eminently enjoyable. They are also unique in my reading experience to the extent that I’ve never read any English short stories quite like them. Perhaps (and I have no way of judging whether my guess is correct), these stories reflect a manner of thinking that is born and bred in a Cairene, (a way of thinking that is entirely foreign, and hence rather puzzling to me as a white North American reader). These stories may reflect the culture, societal values and norms that become second nature to a native-born Arabic speaker, someone close to the ideology of Islam, someone with a different ethnicity than my own, someone - a Cairene, an Egyptian, a native of the Middle East - with a personal or national history that bears zero resemblance to mine.
By all means, buy the book and enjoy a very diverse set of oddly compelling stories. But just don’t imagine that you’ll come away from the book informed in any measure about the city of Cairo.
Paul Weiss
When I booked a trip to Cairo, my first international post-Covid trip in almost three bleak stay-at-home years, I wanted a book that would give me a feel for the city and some small understanding of what makes it tick. I was searching for a book that would treat Cairo in a manner and with a level of importance that would effectively elevate the city itself to the level of a character in the story.
I had hopes but THE BOOK OF CAIRO was not that book!
In fact, far from providing any insights into Cairo’s nature, the stories in THE BOOK OF CAIRO rarely stray far out of the mental headspace of the narrators of the individual stories. They are little more than a collection of short-lived glimpses into the ruminations of a handful of Arabic men simply going about their daily lives and thinking their daily thoughts. And, lest my comment be misunderstood, I’ll rush to say that the stories, English translations from a handful of Egyptian authors, are definitely clever and eminently enjoyable. They are also unique in my reading experience to the extent that I’ve never read any English short stories quite like them. Perhaps (and I have no way of judging whether my guess is correct), these stories reflect a manner of thinking that is born and bred in a Cairene, (a way of thinking that is entirely foreign, and hence rather puzzling to me as a white North American reader). These stories may reflect the culture, societal values and norms that become second nature to a native-born Arabic speaker, someone close to the ideology of Islam, someone with a different ethnicity than my own, someone - a Cairene, an Egyptian, a native of the Middle East - with a personal or national history that bears zero resemblance to mine.
By all means, buy the book and enjoy a very diverse set of oddly compelling stories. But just don’t imagine that you’ll come away from the book informed in any measure about the city of Cairo.
Paul Weiss
May 13, 2019
As I have said many times, I am a big fan of indie publishers, mainly because they always come up with interesting ideas. At the moment, I’m liking Comma Press’ ‘Reading the City’ series. It’s a simple idea, ten short stories about a city written by authors who live there. This time the focus is on Cairo.
We all know that in the last few years Cairo has undergone changes, many of them problematic but I will admit that these ten stories portray Cairo from a different angle. For starters, more than half these stories are genuinely funny; there’s Hatem Hafiz’s Whine (trans by Raphael Cohen) which concerns a government employee, who goes through an existential crises, or the professional rumormonger of Mohammed Kheir’s Talk (trans by Kareem James Abu-Zeid). The sex obsessed marjuana maker in Ahmed Naji’s (trans by Elisabeth Jaquette) brilliant Siniora. Even the opening story Gridlock offers a humorous view of Cairo’s citizens during a busy morning.
Out of the more serious one’s there’s the heartfelt closer An Alternative Guide to Getting Lost, which is about a woman who desperately wants to escape Cairo by plane but cannot and then there’ the centrepiece of the whole collection, Hassan Abdel Mawgoud’s (Trans by Thoraya El-Rayyes) Into the Emptiness, which I think provides a full picture of both the beautiful and frustrating aspect of Cairo life.
Then there’s the downright weird Soul at Rest is about a judgemental person who writes obituaries for a newspaper and Two Sisters, a offbeat romance featuring a masked video store clerk.
The Book of Cairo has something for everyone and is quite a varied collection. It’s quite rare that you’ll laugh, cry and smile within the space of a 100 pages but this volume manages to do that perfectly. Each story is a winner and a must read in it’s own right.
We all know that in the last few years Cairo has undergone changes, many of them problematic but I will admit that these ten stories portray Cairo from a different angle. For starters, more than half these stories are genuinely funny; there’s Hatem Hafiz’s Whine (trans by Raphael Cohen) which concerns a government employee, who goes through an existential crises, or the professional rumormonger of Mohammed Kheir’s Talk (trans by Kareem James Abu-Zeid). The sex obsessed marjuana maker in Ahmed Naji’s (trans by Elisabeth Jaquette) brilliant Siniora. Even the opening story Gridlock offers a humorous view of Cairo’s citizens during a busy morning.
Out of the more serious one’s there’s the heartfelt closer An Alternative Guide to Getting Lost, which is about a woman who desperately wants to escape Cairo by plane but cannot and then there’ the centrepiece of the whole collection, Hassan Abdel Mawgoud’s (Trans by Thoraya El-Rayyes) Into the Emptiness, which I think provides a full picture of both the beautiful and frustrating aspect of Cairo life.
Then there’s the downright weird Soul at Rest is about a judgemental person who writes obituaries for a newspaper and Two Sisters, a offbeat romance featuring a masked video store clerk.
The Book of Cairo has something for everyone and is quite a varied collection. It’s quite rare that you’ll laugh, cry and smile within the space of a 100 pages but this volume manages to do that perfectly. Each story is a winner and a must read in it’s own right.
November 12, 2020
What a unique set of short stories throwing you in the middle of Cairo. Some of the stories were melancholic, others had funny tonalities. I really enjoyed it and curious about other books in this series. Also very nice to get to know different authors from Egypt.
November 12, 2020
The Book of Cairo is a collection of 10 short stories by Egyptian authors translated into English and published by Comma Press. It is part of a series based on cities. The stories cover a wide range of genres. In one sense most of the stories could have been set in a number of cities. I enjoyed the variety of style and will definitely reread some of these. This was the first book I have read from Comma Press and has whetted my appetite to read more.
August 28, 2020
Traffic jams. Office politics. Love affairs in high rise apartment blocks. The isolation of the soul and physical crush of bodies. City life in Cairo, in this book of short stories, is like city life everywhere in the world, and yet the Cairo-ness of Cairo, from microbuses to desert sand blowing over the city, is ever present. When you don’t know anything about a city, it’s hard always to know where these stories tip over into imaginative fantasy, or to understand where they are being funny, but this book gives a visceral sense of Cairo - not the city of pyramids and minarets of the cover illustration, but a city of roads filled with slowly moving traffic and buildings filled with tiny cells of people.
Kudos to the editor Ralph Cormack for arranging these stories in such a fantastic order. Gridlock, by Mohamed Salah al-Azab, is a great introduction to the city and to the limpid style of most of the translations; the two last stories take us back into the universal with - probably my favourite - Nael Eltoukny’s tale of a police officer tasked with finding The Whole Truth (which has to be complete, unified and shocking, but not in fact true) and then back to gridlock with Areej Gamal’s brief study of a different kind of being stuck in the city.
In between, as ever with an anthology, not everything was to my taste but some of these stories got under my skin. The trio of stories about middle-aged male bemusement at the problems of status and accomplishment - Mohammed Kheir’s Talk, Hatem Hafez’ Whine, and Hend Ja’far’s The Soul At Rest - are grounded in specifics like the office tea boys and the automatic negotiations between religions in a religious culture, but express the feelings of human consciousness that translate across all city cultures. Nahla Karam’s delicate story of teenage love The Other Balcony is my favourite of all the female voices in the book.
This collection is an admirable introduction to contemporary Cairo writers and to the city as it is for those who live there, inaccessible to visitors who will never see inside those cars, apartments or offices. There are characters in it I would like to see again. A keeper.
Kudos to the editor Ralph Cormack for arranging these stories in such a fantastic order. Gridlock, by Mohamed Salah al-Azab, is a great introduction to the city and to the limpid style of most of the translations; the two last stories take us back into the universal with - probably my favourite - Nael Eltoukny’s tale of a police officer tasked with finding The Whole Truth (which has to be complete, unified and shocking, but not in fact true) and then back to gridlock with Areej Gamal’s brief study of a different kind of being stuck in the city.
In between, as ever with an anthology, not everything was to my taste but some of these stories got under my skin. The trio of stories about middle-aged male bemusement at the problems of status and accomplishment - Mohammed Kheir’s Talk, Hatem Hafez’ Whine, and Hend Ja’far’s The Soul At Rest - are grounded in specifics like the office tea boys and the automatic negotiations between religions in a religious culture, but express the feelings of human consciousness that translate across all city cultures. Nahla Karam’s delicate story of teenage love The Other Balcony is my favourite of all the female voices in the book.
This collection is an admirable introduction to contemporary Cairo writers and to the city as it is for those who live there, inaccessible to visitors who will never see inside those cars, apartments or offices. There are characters in it I would like to see again. A keeper.
March 26, 2020
I didn't really know what to expect from this book, maybe a collection of stories that really captured the atmosphere of one of my favourite cities. What I found was different, and to be honest I didn't really 'get' a few of these stories, and I found some boring, but some of them were intriguing.
The story which tells the story of how various members of a typical Cairo traffic jam end up there was good; I love stories where different people's lives come together. I was gripped by the story of the sexually frustrated guy smoking weed in his apartment, the descriptions and language explicit in a way I didn't really expect from an Arab writer - he actually ended up in jail for writing so sexually in one of his other books.
The satirical piece on a policeman trying to find The Truth was another that stood out to me, for displaying police brutality and torture methods yet insisting sardonically that policemen who do this are still normal people, because they still fast and read and pace in their apartments.
So I suppose this book really did look into the heart of many issues at the heart of Cairene life that its citizens face and of course when works are translated they do not carry the same essence as they do in their original language so I must take that into account. However I think I was just not really able to sink my teeth into a fair few of these stories, and although I enjoyed reading something different for a change, I ended up being a little underwhelmed.
The story which tells the story of how various members of a typical Cairo traffic jam end up there was good; I love stories where different people's lives come together. I was gripped by the story of the sexually frustrated guy smoking weed in his apartment, the descriptions and language explicit in a way I didn't really expect from an Arab writer - he actually ended up in jail for writing so sexually in one of his other books.
The satirical piece on a policeman trying to find The Truth was another that stood out to me, for displaying police brutality and torture methods yet insisting sardonically that policemen who do this are still normal people, because they still fast and read and pace in their apartments.
So I suppose this book really did look into the heart of many issues at the heart of Cairene life that its citizens face and of course when works are translated they do not carry the same essence as they do in their original language so I must take that into account. However I think I was just not really able to sink my teeth into a fair few of these stories, and although I enjoyed reading something different for a change, I ended up being a little underwhelmed.
March 5, 2022
E.B. White, dalam esainya yang terkenal, "Here is New York", mengatakan bahwa ada tiga New York. Satu milik orang-orang yang bercokol di dalamnya sejak lahir atau kanak-kanak, satu buat para pekerja yang umumnya datang dari kawasan-kawasan satelit, dan satu lagi milik para perantau. Saya kira begitu pula kota-kota raksasa lain di seluruh dunia, termasuk Cairo. Warga asli memberi Cairo identitas, rombongan pekerja ulang-alik memberinya kesibukan, dan para perantau memberinya gairah.
Kumpulan cerita ini menggamit nilai-nilai seperti apa yang E.B. White katakan di atas. Tak hanya sekadar itu, kota, sebagai ruang publik, merupakan gelanggang memori. Mengabadikan peristiwa dan kenangan di setiap likunya: kemacetan tengah kota, gemuruh masyarakat, juga foul, hawasyi di sepanjang pinggiran jalan.
The Book of Cairo juga menceritakan kemajuannya, mengeruk gurun sekaligus menginjak ekonomi masyarakat miskin kota. Ada juga cerita tekanan politik yang mengakibatkan kelangkaan gula. Berkurangnya kadar manis, memudarkan senyum bapak-bapak yang terpaut candu pada kopi dan teh.
Di atas segalanya, lampu remang-remang, elok kota, dan sepanjang Nil mengalir, memberikan cerita bahwa kota ini memang memiliki banyak pengaruh, memang layak untuk dikenang, bagi siapa yang datang lalu pergi, akan merindu dan ingin kembali. Sebagaimana ungkapan terkenal “Sesiapa saja yang meminum Nil, niscaya akan kembali ke Mesir.”
Kumpulan cerita ini menggamit nilai-nilai seperti apa yang E.B. White katakan di atas. Tak hanya sekadar itu, kota, sebagai ruang publik, merupakan gelanggang memori. Mengabadikan peristiwa dan kenangan di setiap likunya: kemacetan tengah kota, gemuruh masyarakat, juga foul, hawasyi di sepanjang pinggiran jalan.
The Book of Cairo juga menceritakan kemajuannya, mengeruk gurun sekaligus menginjak ekonomi masyarakat miskin kota. Ada juga cerita tekanan politik yang mengakibatkan kelangkaan gula. Berkurangnya kadar manis, memudarkan senyum bapak-bapak yang terpaut candu pada kopi dan teh.
Di atas segalanya, lampu remang-remang, elok kota, dan sepanjang Nil mengalir, memberikan cerita bahwa kota ini memang memiliki banyak pengaruh, memang layak untuk dikenang, bagi siapa yang datang lalu pergi, akan merindu dan ingin kembali. Sebagaimana ungkapan terkenal “Sesiapa saja yang meminum Nil, niscaya akan kembali ke Mesir.”
November 17, 2022
"i sat there smoking, dreaming of long walls and filthy surroundings, somewhere with no room for hope or dreams."
i'm so excited to keep reading the books from this series.
i'm so excited to keep reading the books from this series.
Read
April 26, 2020"...an entertaining and varied collection. There are stories that tip into the fantastic alongside stories that are grounded in reality; stories that explore the personal alongside those looking at the political aftermath of the Arab spring; and from stories about everyday trivialities such as bins to those that explore the brutality of the state."
Read James Holden's full review at: https://theshortstory.co.uk/short-sto...
Read James Holden's full review at: https://theshortstory.co.uk/short-sto...
May 15, 2025
firstly, this is not my type of short story collection. i prefer collections where the stories are intertwined and dependent on information from each other, fully formed and a whole community basically. i think it's my bias for long-form prose coming out. anyway, i really liked this collection even though it...is not at all what i described. the stories stop before i would like or personally stop them, but for the first time, i realised the beauty in that. cairo was beautifully described for me, not necessarily aesthetically but realistically beautiful - like oh this is a place like any other place, but it's own unique place...
really nice
really nice
December 28, 2020
My favourite collection of short fiction I've read this year. Lots of the stories (or my favourites anyway) have a mix of mundanity, humour and weirdness. My favourite was Into the Emptiness, the sense of unreality experienced by the narrator living on a city fringe was really convincing. Hamada Al-Ginn is a brutal and funny bit of satire, very keen to read that writers other work.
June 6, 2019
Ok, the first short story ‘Gridlock’ by Mohamed Salah (no Liverpool player) Al-Arab had an interesting kick to it.
‘Talk’ by Mohammad Kheir was chillingly brilliant.
But the rest? Ho hum-to- what-the- ¥$€§
Really, not very worth it.
Lacking in any spiritual awareness. Disappointing.
‘Talk’ by Mohammad Kheir was chillingly brilliant.
But the rest? Ho hum-to- what-the- ¥$€§
Really, not very worth it.
Lacking in any spiritual awareness. Disappointing.
February 10, 2024
These stories were light, often edging on silly --not my favorite tone. Still, many of them offered a satisfying read. Others did not. Overall, the stories that entertained me outnumbered the ones that did not, but I was hoping for a deeper probe into Cairene life.
August 18, 2024
As with every collection of short stories I enjoyed some and didn't like others. Overall it was an interesting read and a glimps into something unknown. It gave me something to think about.
I especially enjoyed "Talk" and "The soul at Rest".
I especially enjoyed "Talk" and "The soul at Rest".
July 14, 2025
I loved this collection of short stories and the insight they give you on life in Cairo. This is by no means a ‘travel book’, but it nonetheless gave me a valuable glimpse into the habits, experiences and history of the people of Cairo.
April 4, 2021
Worth a look for fiction readers of the world. It made me want to look into some of the other fiction of the writers included, especially those persecuted for their work.
May 9, 2023
Strange but also kind of good. Did not know there is also a Book of Tehran yayayayayay
March 16, 2025
3.5
Talk - 4 stars
Talk - 4 stars
Read
June 30, 2025there is something incredibly kafkaesque about every story i’ve ever read about cairo.
May 12, 2021
Enticing appetiser for contemporary Egyptian writing. Full review here: https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress....
October 17, 2022
I love the concept of this series of short story collections. My favorite stories in this collection were The Talk by Mohammed Kheir and The Soul At Rest by Hend Ja’far. A great way to introduce oneself to contemporary Egyptian short fiction in translation, that can then lead to readers hopefully exploring other works by the authors featured. Like with many short story collections, some will grip you more than others. I do appreciate that these short stories are genuinely...short...so you can just sit down and read one before bed, on public transit, etc.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews