Category: Publications & Press
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Using Life: Instructions for Play – By Ben Koerber
This article was published first at: https://thenewinquiry.com/using-life-instructions-for-play/ – Today marks a “Day of Blogging” for Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji, who is serving two years in prison: guilty of having written the playful, language-rich, genre-crossing novel Using Life, he will be given the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, today, in absentia, in New York…
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“Using Life” @ Rain Taxi
“The craziest and most inventive dystopian routine fails to tilt Using Life toward fantasy. Naji’s skill is making such madness read like journalism” Donwload the pdf to read the review Naji_RainTaxi
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M.A.Orthofer: The complete review’s Review
Puplished fist at The complete review: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/egypt/najia.htm Using Life is a novel of Cairo, and of a younger generation of Egyptians struggling in a culture and society that is both extremely deeply-rooted (in history, tradition, etc.) and unmoored. The first chapter is nothing short of apocalyptic in its vision, first…
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“Strategies of Engagement in Using Life: A Multimodal Novel” – By Dr.Marie Thérèse Abdelmessih
This stydy was published first at: https://preo.u-bourgogne.fr/interfaces/index.php?id=314 Multimodality is not new to Egyptian culture whose ancient sign system was the hieroglyph (Lambeens & Pint 240); correspondingly, ancient Egyptian two dimensional mural art was at times sequential, illustrated by hieroglyphic inscriptions. Moreover, a bas-relief dating to the Old Kingdom circa 2,000…
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‘Beige Writing…’ Ahmed Naji in Conversation
Published first time at: https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Ahmed-Naji Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian novelist and writer. His novel Using Life was published in Arabic in 2014 to widespread critical acclaim. Set in a hellish, fantastic version of Cairo, Using Life explores the city on the brink of destruction, while its young people move…
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Thank You PEN
I was honored to be a guest speaker at Pen America New Year New BOOKS party, celebrating with them our love for books and writing. And also remembering other writers who are jailed because of their writing. we live in the times where a dark ghost hovering over the world,…
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Yasmine Seale: After the Revolution
Was published first in: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/01/after-the-revolution-2/ Iwas in a classroom in Turkey recently, explaining the word utopia. From u and topos: “no-place,” possibly a pun on eu-topos, “good place.” See also: dystopia. That, too, is a place that doesn’t exist, but— “Oh,” someone interrupted, “it exists.” My students were Syrian refugees, and they were taking no lessons on where the border…
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Sam Sacks on Using Life
Published first on: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-new-fiction-1513970981 In 2015,shortly after Ahmed Naji published his novel “Using Life” (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 196 pages, $21.95), a sexually explicit dystopian fantasy that imagines the destruction of Cairo under a tsunami of sand, an elderly reader wrote the authorities to complain that…