Looking for promising reads in 2016? Arabic Literature (in English) recommends our forthcoming Spring title Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded by Yusuf al-Shirbini: “This satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society gets a new Arabic edition and facing-page English translation from renowned translator-scholar Humphrey Davies, who recently brought Ahmad al-Shidyaq’s brilliantly funny nineteenth-century Leg over Leg into English.”

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Brains Confounded belongs to an unrecognized genre from an understudied period in Egypt’s Ottoman history, and is a work of outstanding importance for the study of pre-modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic, pitting the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” and urbane in a contest for cultural and religious primacy, with a heavy emphasis on the writing of verse as a yardstick of social acceptability.

Check out the full synopses for Volume One and Volume Two here… and pre-order your copies now!