Yusuf Idris – författare

A carefully curated collection of short story masterpieces from the "genius of the short story" (Tawfiq al-Hakim) and the Arab world's greatest short-story writer of the twentieth century, now available in paperback''Like the Russian aristocrats of Chekhov, the provincial bourgeoisie of Flaubert, or the Ibo villagers of Achebe, Idris raises his authentic characters into convincing types within their context: he makes us live their agonies and hopes.''—Ferial GhazoulYusuf Idris (1927–91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story. He studied and practiced medicine, but his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle, and in writing—and his writing, whether in his regular newspaper columns or in his fiction, often reflected his political convictions. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature more than once, and when the prize went to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Idris felt that he had been passed over because of his outspoken views on Israel. In all, Yusuf Idris wrote some twelve collections of superbly crafted short stories, mainly about ordinary, poor people, many of which have been translated into English and are included, along with an extract from one of his novels, in this collection of the best of his work.

A carefully curated collection of short story masterpieces from the "genius of the short story" (Tawfiq al-Hakim) and the Arab world's greatest short-story writer of the twentieth century''Like the Russian aristocrats of Chekhov, the provincial bourgeoisie of Flaubert, or the Ibo villagers of Achebe, Idris raises his authentic characters into convincing types within their context: he makes us live their agonies and hopes.''—Ferial GhazoulYusuf Idris (1927–91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story. He studied and practiced medicine, but his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle, and in writing—and his writing, whether in his regular newspaper columns or in his fiction, often reflected his political convictions. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature more than once, and when the prize went to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Idris felt that he had been passed over because of his outspoken views on Israel. In all, Yusuf Idris wrote some twelve collections of superbly crafted short stories, mainly about ordinary, poor people, many of which have been translated into English and are included, along with an extract from one of his novels, in this collection of the best of his work.

Yusuf Idris was undoubtedly one of Egypt’s most talented and versatile writers in the second half of the twentieth century. The first two novellas in this volume, Madam Vienna and The Secret of His Power, come from the peak period in his career, the late 1950s and early 1960s, while New York 80 belongs to his late period, the 1980s. Yet something holds these three works together, despite their different periods and their scattered settings: Vienna, an Egyptian Delta village, and New York. They all deal with a seminal theme in Arabic fiction since its nascent years and until today: the East–West encounter, often treated allegorically by Arab writers through a love story between an Arab man and a Western woman who stand for their respective cultures. In these three novellas, Idris harnesses his remarkable narrative skills to tell us some of the most memorable stories of the encounter in Arabic fiction.