Naguib Mahfouz

The National Endowment for the Arts will make 78 grants totaling $1 million for The Big Read projects nationwide in 2012-2013....

Dec. 11 is Naguib Mahfouz's 100th birthday. Mahfouz is the only writer from the Arab world to be awarded the Nobel literature prize. His work has been reprinted in a 20-volume set from American University in Cairo Press....

Here at Book Review, we know what looked good to us on the summer bookshelves, but we couldn't help but wonder what some of our favorite authors were looking forward to tossing in their travel bag or bringing out to the backyard or the beach for one of...

By Joseph Freeman, Orlando Sentinel There's a saying in the Middle East that books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut, and read in Baghdad. The expression mostly highlights Egypt's impressive literary tradition, one populated by writers like Taha...

Suzanne Mubarak wrote a book and then her life changed in ways she never expected....

Words & Ideas Compiled by Grace Krilanovich. SUNDAY Kim Gottlieb-Walker: The author of " Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae" will present and sign her new photography book. Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., L.A. 5 p.m. Free. (323) 660-1175....

Tablet & Pen Literary Landscapes From the Modern Middle East Edited by Reza Aslan W.W. Norton: 658 pp., $35 Of all the reasons why we read, the one that binds us most is empathy. Literature offers a means of imagining ourselves inside the other, of...

When the Nobel Prize in literature was announced this month, the name "Herta Muller" met much American head-scratching. Muller, an ethnically German Romanian who writes of trials of living under a repressive dictatorship, has a strong reputation in Europe...

To the jaded Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher in the Rye," he was the guy responsible for "all that David Copperfield kind of crap." In "The Wire," he's the obsession of a philistine, prize-obsessed editor who can't stop drawing glib parallels between...

Edward Anderson had a strange and sad career. He was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a...

Friday October 17, 1997      Michal Goldman's "Umm Kulthum: A Voice Like Egypt" is an engrossing documentary on the legendary singer whose name was well-known in the West, especially for singing songs that lasted as long as two hours. When she died in...

CAIRO -- Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overruling his president and other Iranian moderates, declared Sunday that British author Salman Rushdie must be killed and sent "to hell" for writing "The Satanic Verses," a novel that many...