ABSTRACT
Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Awlad Haratina, published in my English translation in 1996 as Children of the Alley , is one of the great works—arguably the greatest—of modern Arab literature and is certainly one of the very best-known Arabic-language novels in the English-speaking world. The story of its author, writing, and publication in the Arab world tells a great deal about contemporary Arab culture, while that of its transmission to the West tells something about the West’s reception or perception of that culture. That is why it is so deserving of special attention as a case study of Arabic-language culture and literature, though it is not typical, of course, of those things as a whole.
