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English edition
Sep 2005
316 pp.
Paperback
12.5X20 cm
$16.95
LE 75.00
ISBN
978 977 424 958 7
For sale worldwide
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The Other Place
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Ibrahim Abdel Meguid
Translated by
Farouk Abdel Wahab
New paperback edition
The Other Place portrays the shallowness of the petrodollar culture and the price one pays for quick money. The protagonist of this prize-winning novel, an educated middle-class Egyptian from Alexandria, describes his experiences and those of migrant workers and professionals in one of the Gulf states, and their interaction with the oil-rich country’s local elite and with agents of western businesses.
The book pictures rather than states the desolation brought about when market values take over and the ravages that such an order causes to all who partake in it.
Ibrahim Abdel Meguid succeeds in representing imaginatively the important phenomenon of migration and the barren landscape of the petrodollar culture, and at the same time penetrates the rationalizing mechanisms of the migrants and their psychological make-up. The Other Place was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996.
“Ibrahim Abdel Meguid has already established himself as one of our major authors.”
— Naguib Mahfouz
“What raises The Other Place to the level of a universal discourse is its combination of critical realism with a subtle symbolic dimension.”
— Award Committee, Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature
IBRAHIM ABDEL MEGUID has combined critical and creative writing throughout his literary career. Soon after completing a B.A. in philosophy at Alexandria University, he published his first novel, and soon took up the position of Consultant for Cultural Matters at the Popular Culture Council.
Farouk Abdel Wahab, the Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago, has translated numerous Arabic works of fiction, most recently Birds of Amber by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid (AUC Press, 2005).
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