This book is about books, writing, and literary circles in Alexandria. It consists of two parts, which together form a two-pronged argument. The first part attempts to understand literature as a social practice in which individual motivations are intertwined with the supporting and restrictive structures of social and literary circles. It also introduces the idea of “writing life” in cases of productive marginality. The second part highlights three fundamental themes in the writing encountered by the researchers: revolution, the city, and migration, all of which address in one way or another the lived experience of plurality in the absence of pluralism and the coexistence of different ways of life, visions, and literary aesthetics in constant conflict. The writers interviewed by the researchers and their writings helped them to think of literary imagination as an integral part of these social conflicts and transformations. Here, the role of literary imagination is not to resist authority or provide moral guidance, but rather to engage in an open-ended collusion.
