Slipping - by Mohamed Kheir (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>The English-language debut novel from a prolific, award-winning Egyptian writer, <em>Slipping</em> offers a distinct brand of magical realism, one borne out of local legends, spectacles and mysteries both natural and manmade, to create a beautiful, musical reading experience that will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Antonio Tabucchi.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>There are shards of magic to be found on every page of this novel." --Omar El Akkad, author of <em>American War</em></b></p><p>A struggling journalist named Seif is introduced to a former exile with an encyclopedic knowledge of Egypt's obscure, magical places. Together, as explorer and guide, they step into the fragmented, elusive world the Arab Spring left behind. They trek to an affluent neighborhood where giant corpse flowers rain from the sky. They join an anonymous crowd in the dark, hallucinating together before a bare cave wall. They descend a set of stairs to the spot along the Nile River where, it's been said, you can walk on water. But what begins as a fantastical excursion through a splintered nation quickly winds its way inward as Seif begins to piece together the trauma of his own past, including what happened to Alya, his lover with the remarkable ability to sing any sound: crashing waves, fluttering wings, a roaring inferno.</p><p>Musical and parabolic, <em>Slipping</em> seeks nothing less than to accept the world in all its mystery. An innovative novel that searches for meaning within the haze of trauma, it generously portrays the overlooked miracles of everyday life, and attempts to reconcile past failures--both personal and societal--with a daunting future. Delicately translated from Arabic by Robin Moger, this is a profound introduction to the imagination of Mohamed Kheir, one of the most exciting writers working in Egypt today.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>"The world of <em>Slipping</em>, Mohamed Kheir's challenging, fantastical novel set in post-Arab Spring Egypt, is one where the boundaries between history and myth, dreaming and waking, are constantly in flux....Only Kheir's intricate prose, and Robin Moger's deft translation from the Arabic, could tell this story; this is the book that all the indie booksellers I know are raving about right now, and with good reason." <b>--Corinne Segal, <em>Literary Hub</em></b></p><p>"Connecting the fragmentary and seemingly contradictory details of the novel's architecture makes for a thrilling read. It would take many passes to join every last piece of the puzzle, but as any puzzler knows, part of the fun comes from those small epiphanies that get us a tiny step closer to illumination....absurd touches elevate the novel, forcing us to reconsider the mundane elements of our reality--roofs, flowers, bread--we take for granted." <b>--Matt Matros, <em>The Chicago Review of Books</em></b></p><p>"A carefully crafted love poem and a commentary on the fragileness of post-Arab Spring dreaming, <em>Slipping</em> leaves the reader questioning reality while showing fiction's ability to trap the dreamer within their own fantasies." <b>--<em>Words Without Borders</em></b></p><p>"Enchanting... Kheir demonstrates a marvelous imagination and harnesses the magic of storytelling. Readers are in for a treat." <b><em>--Publishers Weekly</em></b></p><p>"Kheir brilliantly weaves a tale that is well paced, sweeping through a country that has transformed as much as its people." <b>--<em>Arab News</em></b></p><p>"A fantastical journey set in post-Arab Spring Egypt...Kheir asks whether we can ever let go of our ghosts--can we let go of them before they consume us? For a region which has experienced collective trauma for so long, this is indeed a pressing message, which calls for healing and, one day, dreaming together." <b>--<em>The Markaz Review</em></b></p><p>"Mohamed Kheir is an exceptional talent and <em>Slipping</em> is a brilliant, lucid dream of a book. Translated with nuance and care by Robin Moger, it is a dizzying dissection of fragmented lives, and reading it brought me back to Egypt, the country of my birth, in a way both familiar and entirely new. There are shards of magic to be found on every page of this novel." <b>--Omar El Akkad, author of <em>What Strange Paradise</em> and <em>American War</em></b></p><p>"Shifting between stark realism and the mythic, Mohamed Kheir's <em>Slipping</em> avoids easy categorization. It's one of a growing number of fictional takes on real-world conflict that move into the uncanny to illustrate the extreme experiences of civilians, and that dizzying aesthetic is used to powerful effect here." <b>--Tobias Carroll, <em>Words Without Borders</em></b></p><p>"Haunting... Kheir's masterful storytelling not only encourages, but almost necessitates, rereading. Slipping is a novel about the fragility in all things: society, love, even reality." <b>--<em>Foreword Reviews</em></b></p><p>"[<em>Slipping</em>] reminded me of the bureaucratic nightmare depicted in Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil...A remarkable piece of writing, a book filled with magic and wonder and tragedy and pain." <b>--<em>Locus Magazine</em></b></p><p>"Kheir shows us that the living and the dead haunt each other equally--every city a necropolis, every song one of mourning--through a music suffused with the feeling of 'all the singing I'd ever known run together in one moment.' <em>Slipping</em> is a crushing and deeply political lament, with a many-angled architecture that recalls Gonçalo Tavares, and the deepest feel for gauzy intersubjectivity this side of Mulholland Drive. Robin Moger has as usual done a champion job shepherding its luminous obscurities and weird proximities into English." <b>--Ian Dreiblatt, author of <em>forget thee</em> and translator of <em>Spiral</em>, by Dmitrii Furman</b></p> <p>"An extraordinarily sensitive feat of literary engineering and an adventure in narrative prose that establishes Kheir as one of the leading lights of the current literary scene." <b>--<em>Al Modon</em></b></p><p>"One of the most beautiful and lyrical Arabic novels of recent times." <b>--Yazin Al Haj</em></b></p><p>"This singular text lies before the reader like the pieces of a puzzle, and invites you to make sense of their disorder. The connections are there but you must look hard to see them and the reward comes in the final pages, where the novel's fragmentation stands revealed as an avatar of an individual's disintegration and the chaos of an entire society." <b>--<em>Shorouk News</em></b></p><p>"A mosaic of minor tales and the ghostlike forms of characters come from worlds not our own." <b>--<em>Al Dustour</em></b></p><br>
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