Children of the Alley

by Naguib Mahfouz

First published in Arabic in 1959, this robust multigenerational arabesque fuses trenchant social allegory and pungent realism in a skein of stories within stories. The "children'' of Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Mahfouz's title are beggars, peddlars, drug addicts, homeless, swindlers, cripples and ordinary people struggling to survive in a Cairo neighborhood at once modern and timeless. Their "alley'' winds up toward a mansion owned by a capricious, secluded feudal lord who cloisters h...