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Nov 12, 2024 | 
almendron.com | Ahmed Naji
Shortly after I arrived at Tora Maximum Security Prison in Cairo, a prisoner with a trendy haircut and glasses entered my cell, handed me a plastic bag and whispered, “From Alaa”. Inside the bag were several packs of cigarettes, the currency of the prison; blue and white T-shirts, the only colors prisoners could wear; and small plastic packets of tea and sugar. It was February 2016.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Ahmed Naji
Shortly after I arrived at Tora Maximum Security Prison in Cairo, a prisoner with a trendy haircut and glasses entered my cell, handed me a plastic bag and whispered, "From Alaa." Inside the bag were several packs of cigarettes, the currency of the prison; blue and white T-shirts, the only colors prisoners could wear; and small plastic packets of tea and sugar. It was February2016.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Ahmed Naji |Mira Marcinów |Fernanda Trías
From NYRB Classics | Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley | Fiction | 320 pages | ISBN 9781681378220 | US$18.95What the publisher says: “In 1989, the acclaimed Hong Kong writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
thebeliever.net | Ahmed Naji
Ahmed Naji I visited Michael Heizer’s City for the first time in my dreams, twenty-seven years ago. I was twelve years old, living with my family in Kuwait, when I started to experience a recurring dream where I found myself wandering, naked, through an unfamiliar city, engulfed in shame, desperately seeking a wall to hide behind—but none existed.
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Jul 5, 2024 | 
themarkaz.org | Ahmed Naji
Reading Time :14 minutesThe meta narrative behind Frank Herbert’s legendary sci-fi trilogy Dune foresees the modern-day disaster of never-ending colonialism and a planet destroyed by oil. Ahmed NajiI grew up reading science fiction — in Arabic — from an early age, eventually becoming a science fiction writer myself. However, it wasn’t until I migrated to the U.S. six years ago that I was introduced to Frank Herbert.
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May 7, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Ahmed Naji |Fatema Haidari |Ruth Kemp |Alexander Aguayo
1. Las Vegas was brimming with mosques. As soon as I’d typed “mosque near me” into the Google Maps search, myriad red dots displayed themselves all at once on my screen. The Al-Hamada mosque, one of the first Las Vegas mosques founded in the seventies, and winner of a five-star rating, boasted a review claiming that its writer had “felt at peace” as soon as he’d crossed over the threshold.
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
fivebooks.com | Susan Ito |David Mas Masumoto |Ahmed Naji |Katharine Halls
Thanks for joining us. We love featuring the National Book Critics Circle shortlists; they always surface excellent books we might otherwise have missed. What were you looking for when you were drawing up the 2024 NBCC shortlist of the best recent memoirs? All the books that made the shortlist were works that the committee members felt fundamentally changed how we viewed the world, whether an aspect of history or how to view the present.
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Nov 2, 2023 | 
washingtonpost.com | Ahmed Naji
CommentSaveIn 2016, Ahmed Naji served 10 months of a two-year prison sentence in Egypt for “violating public decency” in his novel “Using Life.” He reflects on his time in prison in his new memoir, “Rotten Evidence” (translated by Katharine Halls), describing the everyday experience of oppression and confinement.
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Oct 19, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Ahmed Naji
Sometime in the early twentieth century, a large subgroup of Arabic words and expressions referring to sex and sexual organs began to disappear from printed books, as if the educated classes had signed a code of honor agreeing never to set them down on paper. This was why, when they found me guilty, the court of appeal would not record the turns of phrase I had used that they claimed to find so scandalizing.
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Oct 17, 2023 | 
greenapplebooks.com | Ahmed Naji |Katharine Halls |Daniel Gumbiner
This event will take place at our 9th Ave location in the Inner SunsetJoin us on Thursday, October 19 at 7pm PT when Ahmed Naji celebrates the release of his book, Rotten Evidence, with Daniel Gumbiner at 9th Ave!Masks Encouraged for In-Person AttendanceOr watch online at the link belowhttps://youtube.com/live/Yeof_h19rOg?feature=sharePraise for Ahmed Naji“Some writers, in the face of state oppression, will write like Solzhenitsyn.
