... Ahmed Alaidy Alaa Al Aswany Naguib Mahfouz Nasserism Sadat era This article considers the narrative structures of Egyptian novels of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. By doing so, I argue that these novels represent a certain return to realism. Insofar as they depict...

..., Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building (2004) fails as realism, despite the prominence of recognizably realist techniques, and Fasil Lil-dahsha's more iconoclastic Interlude for Bewilderment (2007) succeeds. For while Lil-dahsha evokes the absurdity of life under neoliberalism, Al-Aswany turns...