Naguib Mahfouz is widely regarded as Egypt's finest writer. While his works remained largely unknown in English-speaking countries for most of the twentieth century, the author has nevertheless been viewed by many critics outside the Middle East as the exemplar of Arabic literature. Mahfouz was suddenly cast into the limelight in the West on October 13, 1988, when he became the first Arab writer to be honored with the Nobel Prize for literature. Prior to his receiving the esteemed award, only a fraction of Mahfouz's more than fifty works had been translated into English; after weeks of negotiations in the fall of 1988, however, Doubleday acquired the English publishing rights to fourteen of the Nobel laureate's books, including four titles that had never before appeared in English.

Mahfouz is credited with popularizing the novel and short story as viable genres in the Arab literary world, where poetry has been the medium...