A Dog with No Tail - Softcover

Hamdi Abu Golayyel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9774167368 ISBN 13: 9789774167362

Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press, 2015

Synopsis

In a world with no meaning, meaning is an act . . . This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt's dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights. Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring novelist and construction laborer of the lowest order, leads us down a fractured path of reminiscence in his quest for purpose and identity in a world where the old orders and traditions are powerless to help. Bawdy and wistful, tragicomic and bitter, his stories loop and repeat, crackling with the frictive energy of colliding worlds and linguistic registers. These are the tales of Cairo's new Bedouin, men not settled by the state but permanently uprooted by it. Like their lives, their stories are dislocated and unplotted, mapping out their quest for meaning in the very act of placing brick on brick and word on word.

About this title

Review:

"A Dog with No Tail is many things: a sophisticated storytelling experiment; a subaltern chronicle of the invisible world of day labour and the fading history of a Bedouin tribe; and a guarded but deeply felt celebration of writing"--The National

About the Author:

Hamdi Abu Golayyel was born in the Fayoum, Egypt, in 1967. He is the author of three short story collections and two novels, the first of which, Thieves in Retirement, was published in English in 2007. A Dog with No Tail was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2008. Robin Moger studied Egyptology and Arabic at Oxford, graduating with a first class degree in 2001. He is the translator of Women of Karantina by Nael Eltoukhy (AUC Press, 2014).

About this edition

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 9774167368
• ISBN 13: 9789774167362
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160