This collection of short and pithy passages comprises a personal and reflective commentary on situations and events that have lodged themselves in Naguib Mahfouz’s memory and influenced him in some way. He considers, with characteristic wry good humor, the myriad perplexities of existence, including his preoccupation with old age, death, and life’s transitory nature.

Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He wrote nearly 40 novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous cinema plots and scenarios. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988. He died in Cairo on August 30, 2006 at the age of 94.