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Book Title

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Noor Naga
Body
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire—for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other—takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.
 
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?

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List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-081-9
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
208
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire

About the Author

Noor  Naga
Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Cairo. Apart from her debut novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, she is also the author of the verse-novel Washes, Prays. Noor teaches at the American University in Cairo.
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Praise

  • “Propulsive and philosophical. . . . The novel brims with sparkling prose. Naga’s sentences are precise and rich with bold, complex observations. . . . [An] exhilarating debut.”—Nadia Owusu, The New York Times Book Review 
     
  • “The prose is blazing, the politics nuanced, and the honesty unflinching.”—Tess Gunty, The Guardian (UK)
  • “At once romantic, complex, and ultimately tragic.”—Booklist
     
  • “Extraordinary.”—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Library Journal, starred review
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