When a seventeen-year-old flees his violent father and heads to Cairo to chase his dream of breaking into the arts, he ends up in a crumbling flat with a mercurial landlady and her volatile son. Set in the early 1990s, The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer is a sharply observed, darkly comic coming-of-age novel about ambition, survival, and the strange intimacies forged by necessity. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this cult-favourite debut by Egyptian screenwriter, journalist, and satirist Belal Fadl appears in English for the first time, in a vivid translation by Osama Hammad.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"A darkly hilarious, devastatingly sharp portrait of Cairo's underclass in the 1990s. Belal Fadl writes with such verve and vividness that even the most absurd moments feel heartbreakingly real."-Abdelhadi Hreiba, Writer and Cultural Critic "In Um Mimi, Belal Fadl breaks free of euphemism and restraint to deliver a raw, obscene, and hilarious vision of a world where power means exploitation and survival depends on complicity. It's a coming-of-age story that reeks of filth, sorrow, and brutal truth." -Ahmed Naji, Bidayat, Issue 33, Spring 2023
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78871-114-2 (9781788711142)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Belal Fadl (b. 1974, Cairo) is one of Egypt's most influential contemporary writers. A journalist, screenwriter, and satirist, he began his career at Rose al-Yusuf and co-founded the landmark newspaper Al-Dustour. His bold political columns for Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Shorouk gained a wide following and often sparked national debate. Fadl has written more than 18 feature films-many of them box-office hits-and is widely credited with shaping a new wave of Egyptian popular cinema. The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer is his first novel to appear in English. He lives and writes in New York.