One of the Nobel laureate's more unusual works, Mirrors consists of vignettes of characters from the life of a writer much like Mahfouz himself. Accompanying each vignette is a portrait of the character by Alexandrian artist Self Wanli. From the lofty heights of intellectual salons to the seamy squalor of drug dens, Mirrors also touches on the recent history of Egypt.

Author Biography

Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in the 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. Seif Wanli was born in Alexandria in 1906. His prolific output is estimated at 3,000 oil paintings and more than 80,000 sketches; he also designed sets for theatre and opera productions. He died in in 1979. Roger Allen is professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He has translated Mahfouz's Autumn Quail and other works of Arabic literature.