Michael Cooperson

Khairy Shalaby (1938–2011) was born in Kafr al-Shaykh in Egypt’s Nile Delta. He wrote seventy books, including novels, short stories, historical tales, and critical studies. His novel The Lodging House was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003, and was published in English translation by the American University in Cairo Press in 2006.

Michael Cooperson is a writer and translator. He has translated Ibn al-Jawzī’s Life of Ibn Hanbal and al-Hariri’s Impostures, both for New York University Press. A professor of Near Eastern Languages at UCLA, he is the author of Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma’mun and Al-Mamun (Cambridge University Press, 2000). His current projects are a visual-narrative history of pre-modern Arabic literature and a study of time-travel fiction as a global phenomenon. His other interests include Maltese and Modern Greek language and literature.

6 December, 2024 • Khairy Shalaby, Michael Cooperson

The Time-Travels of the Man who Sold Pickles and Sweets—an Excerpt

Ibn Shalaby, like many Egyptians, is looking for a job. Yet, unlike most of his fellow citizens, he is prone to sudden dislocations in time.