The Cairo Notebooks

Poetry. Cross-Genre. Literary Nonfiction. Middle Eastern Studies. THE CAIRO NOTEBOOKS, a collection of travel writing by Ammiel Alcalay, blurs the lines between fiction, poetry, and documentation. "There is in what you hear of these CAIRO NOTEBOOKS the cruelty of compassion, the pain of love, the tearing apart of fateful encounters. Here, a novel, a poem, are fused like the impossible couplings they portray. Poetry, history and fiction come together so that they can, further down, be broken into parts, again, anew. All that makes the tragic pulse of the Arab East is here charted on the map of a real and still 'ideal' city, the way it is charted on the bodies of the tortured and dead"—Etel Adnan.