The Naguib Mahfouz Centennial Library

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of the great Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, the AUC Press, which has been publishing English translations of Mahfouz's work since 1978, presents all his novels, three collections of short stories, and his autobiographical writings in a single library of 20 hardbound volumes, including all 42 works translated into English. From Khufu's Wisdom, first published in Arabic in 1939, to his last work of extended fiction, The Coffeehouse (1988), all thirty-five of his novels are here, along with thirty-eight short stories His Echoes of an Autobiography is included, as well as his exquisite late series of intensely short fictions known as The Dreams and the collection of his weekly newspaper columns, Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber. This unique library brings together all Naguib Mahfouz's translated work for the first time in a very special publishing event. - Volume 1: Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War - Volume 2: Cairo Modern, Khan al-Khalili - Volume 3: Midaq Alley - Volume 4: The Mirage - Volume 5: The Beginning and the End - Volume 6: Palace Walk - Volume 7: Palace of Desire - Volume 8: Sugar Street - Volume 9: Children of the Alley - Volume 10: The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail, The Search - Volume 11: The Beggar, Adrift on the Nile, Miramar - Volume 12: Mirrors, Love in the Rain, Karnak Café - Volume 13: Fountain and Tomb, Heart of the Night, Respected Sir - Volume 14: The Harafish - Volume 15: In the Time of Love, Wedding Song, Arabian Nights and Days - Volume 16: The Final Hour, Before the Throne - Volume 17: The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth - Volume 18: The Day the Leader Was Killed, Morning and Evening Talk, The Coffeehouse - Volume 19: Echoes of an Autobiography, The Dreams, Dreams of Departure, Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber - Volume 20: The Time and the Place, The Seventh Heaven, Voices from the Other World.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.

The protagonist of these stories is the maddening, irascible and fascinating Professor George Edward Challenger. In these collected tales he faces adventures such as that high above the Amazon rain forest in "The Lost World" and the challenges of"The Land of Mist."