"Here, finally, is some writing with a genuine purchase on things of worth. The collection of pithy short stories, filled with a sad wonder, tells of contemporary Egyptians . . . timorously rebelling against the conformism of life along the Nile."
—Observer
". . . Bakr emerges as a fine observer of her country's times, with a vision which remains, for all its engagement, quirky and distinctively personal."
— Times Literary Supplement
Set among the poor of contemporary Cairo, these thirteen stories and one short novella tell of women struggling to provide themselves with the basic necessities of life. They explore the limits of self-awareness, the pressures to conform, and some of the strange paths to escape that women resort to in a conservative society shot through with social and sexual prejudice and preconceptions.
Salwa Bakr contends that Arabic literature has been the domain of men and that it is the task of women writing in Arabic to redress the balance. One of Egypt's most interesting women writers of fiction, she is an emerging talent of great power.
This translation of The Wiles of Men and Other Stories was first published in hardcover by Quartet Books of Great Britain in 1992. Translator Denys Johnson-Davies is one of the West's foremost translators of Arabic into English.
