An Arab tyrant once infamously declared, 'I see heads that are ripe for plucking.' Mahmoud Al-Wardani's novel turns the statement on its head, using it as a point of departure to delineate a whole history of Arab tyranny and oppression. In Heads Ripe for Plucking, an impaled head seeks solace in narrating to itself stories of others who have sustained a similar fate. Beheadings, both literal and metaphorical - torture, murder, decapitation, brainwashing, losing one's head - are the subject of the six stories that unfold over the three sections of this novel. The narrative takes us from the most archetypal beheading in Arabo-Islamic history, that of al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, via the torture of communists in Nasser's detention camps, the meanderings of a Cairene teenager unwittingly caught in the 'bread riots' of 1977, a crime passionnel in a family alienated by petrodollars, the remembering of a father killed in the 1991 Gulf War and recovery of his lost manuscript on the eve of the millennium, into a dystopic future where heads are periodically severed to undergo maintenance and reloading of programs. The novel garnered critical acclaim for its experimentation with language and form as much as for its excavation of alternative histories.
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MAHMOUD AL-WARDANI was born in Cairo in 1950. He began writing shortly after leaving university and is the author of three volumes of short stories, six novels, and three works of nonfiction. His stories have appeared in translation in English, German, and Italian, and one novel has been published in French. He is currently deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly Cairo newspaper Akhbar al-yawm and editor of the opinion page of the daily al-Badil.
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Ubaydallah ibn Ziyad, Farid Haddad, Faysal Street, Hadara Prison, Muslim ibn Aqil, Shuhdi Attiya, Gulf War, Cancer of the Soul, Sayyida Zaynab, Great Pyramid, Abu Zaabal Prison, Muhammad Saad, Chivas Regal, Suez Canal, Islamic Cairo, New Year's Eve, Mukhtar Museum, Louis Awad, Ahmad Urabi, Pyramid Plateau Browse Sample Pages:
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Ubaydallah ibn Ziyad, Farid Haddad, Faysal Street, Hadara Prison, Muslim ibn Aqil, Shuhdi Attiya, Gulf War, Cancer of the Soul, Sayyida Zaynab, Great Pyramid, Abu Zaabal Prison, Muhammad Saad, Chivas Regal, Suez Canal, Islamic Cairo, New Year's Eve, Mukhtar Museum, Louis Awad, Ahmad Urabi, Pyramid Plateau Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | First Pages | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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