Albert Cossery

• May-2010
• / Literary
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Three friends in a small Egyptian city celebrate idleness, elegance, and joie de vivre. Summoned home to Egypt after a long European debauch (disguised as “study”), our hero Teymour -- in the opening line of A Splendid Conspiracy -- is feeling �...

• Jul-2010
• / Literary
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Who are the jokers?The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by ...

• Dec-2011
• / Literary
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A delightful, deeply funny novel about the triumph of the perfect prankster -- an elegant gentleman pickpocket in Cairo. His eyes “shine with a glimmer of perpetual amusement”; his sartorial taste is impeccable; Ossama is “a thief, not a legi...

• Jan-2012
• / Literary
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Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery’s wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the most ...

• Nov-2013
• / Literary
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A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile" Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery’s biting social satire about a father, his three sons...