Marfaa for Culture and Publishing

Kamel RIAHI

In this collection of private diaries, Kamel Riahi takes us behind the scenes of writing to spy on the work of an essayist, showing how the idea for an article is born through an enjoyable oscillation between diaries, opinion pieces, and cultural essays that emerge from the everyday.
The reader delves into the writer’s mind, experiencing a unique writing journey in a unique time, when human movement came to a halt and death stood at every door. It was then that people began to rediscover themselves by posing the age-old question —Who are we?— as it had never been asked before.

Kamel Riahi is a Tunisian novelist and journalist. He holds advanced degrees in the critique of Arabic literary fiction. He has worked as a correspondent for numerous magazines and websites and has hosted several television programs. He has received multiple awards, including the Golden Comar Award for Best Tunisian Novel in 2007 and the Short Story Prize in Cairo in 2005. His works have been translated into French, Italian, English, Hebrew, and Portuguese.

2025 - 276 pages - ISBN: 978625977160
Diary literature, essays

Mamdouh FARAJ AL-NABI

The Rhetoric of Black Writing is a bold critical journey through the turbulent paths of writing, where imagination takes the lead, desire dictates, and the boundaries of authority intersect with the dilemmas of cultural censorship. The book invites the reader to reclaim the experience of writing as a tool of resistance and as a means to shape an alternative discourse to the dominant one.
Through this work, Mamdouh Faraj Al-Nabi offers a balanced critical reading that serves as a “narrative artery,” pumping fresh perspectives into the heart of literary discourse without dissolving into rigid theories or recycled slogans. It is a discourse grounded in critical knowledge, reshaping concepts from within and building bridges between the text and the reader in search of an authentic voice.

Mamdouh Faraj Al-Nabi is an Egyptian academic and literary critic who writes for arab newspapers and both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed journals. He has received numerous literary awards in the field of literary criticism, including the Sharjah Award, the Katara Award for Critical Studies, and the Taha Hussein Award. His notable works include The Autobiographical Novel in Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz: Memory and Forgetting, and Recovering Taha Hussein.

2025 - 365 pages - ISBN: 978625977160
Diary Studies and Literary Criticism

Ahmed Abdel HALIM

Ahmed Abdel Halim’s 1995 novel The Follower and Suleiman is a tense, ironic narrative that portrays exile not as freedom but as another prison. The story follows a young Egyptian political prisoner who escapes to Beirut, redefining his bond with homeland through memories of childhood and adolescence.
At its core, the novel is about rejection —of prison, exile, and even belonging— yet this rejection paradoxically becomes a form of belonging. Abdel Halim ties the body to power, weakness, and resistance, stripping it of love.
For the marginalized, love is unreachable; anger, rebellion, and insult take its place. The novel reflects fractured consciousness, where rejection and yearning coexist in exile’s suffocating space.

Ahmed Abdel Halim is an Egyptian writer, researcher, and political activist, born in Damietta in 1995. His work focuses on political sociology, the body and its relationship to authoritarianism, and punitive policies in Egyptian prisons.

2025 - 264 pages - ISBN: 9786259771991
Novel