Naguib Mahfouz - 345 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Born and spent early years in Gamaliya, a quarter of Cairo, Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz wrote about the place, the culture in a realistic way. The place is portrayed in many future novels and books such as Midaq Alley, The Cairo Trilogy, Children of the Alley and The Harafish.

The 1919 Revolution also had a lasting effect on Mahfouz, leaving him with his first real sense of patriotic feeling and greatly influencing his writings. Interestingly, he later became disillusioned with the Revolution of 1952, though he took issue with its practices, not its principles. He voiced his criticisms clearly in some of his writings of the 1960s, most popularly in his novel Miramar. 

( source - AUC press)

He won the Egyptian State Prize twice for his writings, the 1988 the Nobel Prize for Literature and received the Presidential Medal from the American University in Cairo in 1989.



Whisper of Madness (Hams Al-Junun) is Naguib Maḥfouz’s first short story collection. It consists of short stories taking place in Cairo, following the scandals of the city’s rich and famous and the city’s underworld, with voices of patriotism and nationalism throughout the collection. 

The stories were first published separately in newspapers and magazines in the 1930s. The short story The Price of Weakness (Thaman Al-Duʿf) is considered to be Maḥfouz’s first short story, and it was published in August 1934.

Image - 1988 edition of the collection