A young man’s dreams for a better future as a student in the Teachers’ Institute are shattered after he assaults one of his instructors for discriminating against him. From then on, he begins his descent into the underworld. Penniless, he seeks refuge in Wikalat ‘Atiya, a historic but now completely run-down caravanserai that has become the home of the town’s marginal and underprivileged characters. This award-winning novel takes on epic dimensions as the narrator escorts us on a journey to this underworld, portraying - as he sinks further into its intricate relationships - the many characters that inhabit it. Through a labyrinth of tales, reminiscent of the popular Arab tradition of storytelling, we are introduced to these marginal beings, whose lives oscillate between the real and the fantastic, the contemporary and the timeless, and to the relationship between the newly marginalized middle class and the already marginal popular class. And while the narrator starts out as a spectator of these characters’ lives, he soon becomes an integral part of the lodging house’s community of rogues.

KHAIRY SHALABY, born in Kafr al-Shaykh in Egypt’s Nile Delta in 1938, has written seventy books, including novels, short stories, historical tales, and critical studies. The Lodging House was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003.

Farouk Abdel Wahab, the Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Chicago, has translated numerous Arabic works of fiction, most recently A Certain Woman by Hala El Badry (AUC Press 2003).

"Khaira Shalaby's The Loding House is a wise, anarchic, ribald, compassionate compendium of life at its most precarious and most ebullient. Its narrator is a young drop-out explelled from teachers' college for assaulting an instructor who picked on him as 'barefoot riffraff', one of a generation of peasants and urban poor rising with the widening of education. His fall deposits him in Wikalat Atiya, once a famed caravanserai outside Alexandria, now a twilight zone in the city of Damanhour. Descending into an underworld of heaving doss houses, hashish dens and Bohemian tea houses, he finds a rogues' gallery of fugitives and addicts fearful of the regime's secret police. Yet as he comes to know its characters-from peddlars and conment to midwives and matchmakers-he is buoyed by a world of shared fests and morality tales, seductive and self-reliant women, and landlords who give meddling authorities the run-around . . . In awarding the prize to this novel . . . the judges were recognising the zest of Farouk Abdel Wahab's translation, and his service in bringing Shalaby's novel to teh English-speaking world."   -- The Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, October 2007