One of the biggest benefits I got from spending a full year in the army -if not the biggest- is the fact one of my fellow soldiers was an assistant in economics in a university near Cairo. He was charged with office work, being of higher education and being able to deal with modern technology; computer and so on and we could spend long hours ( Read more... )

Ernst Hemingway used to have a big problem with the block. In his mini-autobiography, titled " A moveable feast", he mentions his struggle with evaporating words, dead ends and lost expressions every time he decides to sit and write. He would urge himself to write just one true word and take it from there; just one word and he is on the right track ( Read more... )

But his voice filled my spirit with a strange sweet sound

In that night there was music in my mind
And through music my soul began to soar
And I heard what I'd never heard before
Yet in his eyes: All the sadness of the world
His pleading eyes, that both threaten and adore

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I  was late in writing about this novel, this new miracle in the history of Egypt's literature but too late is better than never.... The Yacoubian Building is a novel by the famous, respected and highest selling writer in the last decade in Egypt...  Alaa el Aswany.

As you see in the title, the novel talked about the plagues of Egypt but not the ( Read more... )