But the stories are also full of the black humor, drug culture, and vibrant noise that underlie much of contemporary Egyptian fiction, in styles that range from a hardboiled realism to a flowing, tragicomic surrealism. In part, this is a book of despair: all but one of its stories were published after 2013, the year Abdelfattah al-Sisi came to power. While these earlier books gave broad overviews of their cities’ fictions, The Book of Cairo is very much a young book, built not from work by twentieth-century greats like Naguib Mahfouz and Latifa al-Zayyat, but from the rising stars of the twenty-first: Ahmed Naji, Eman Abdelrahim, Nael Eltoukhy. There have been two previous Arab city-anthologies: The Book of Gaza (2014) , edited by author Atef Abu Saif and The Book of Khartoum (2016) , edited by Cormack and Max Schmookler. The Book of Cairo, edited by Raphael Cormack, is part of an anthology series from Comma Press that collages together portraits of cities around the world. The 2019 anthology The Book of Cairo is full of these shifting streets, where people hide their secrets among a thousand rumors: manufactured by the government, by nosy neighbors, by snarky co-workers, or even by services that specialize in rumor production. While a small percentage of Cairenes stay in walled compounds at the city’s edges, places with names like Swan Lake and La Rose, most struggle to make their way through the city’s ever-changing core. Cairo-a sprawling city of more than 20 million people-has at least as many jokes, secrets, and rumors.
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