Yes, but not dramatic in a good way—the way, say, someone is who risks his life for a common good, to save the life of a drowning child, or who takes an unpopular but principled stand on a moral issue at a critical moment. Or even a tragic hero who makes a terrible mistake and pays a terrible price. Dramatic rather in a bad way, or at least theatrical in the way a baby is, or a bad actor: the latter hammy and unconvincing, the former helplessly, needily demanding of attention. I am always feigning astonishment or disgust or rapture or some other histrionic emotion, slapping my forehead and crying merde alors, dropping my jaw, and so on. Maybe it’s not a bad actor I resemble so much as a very specific type of methodical actor: an actor from the Delsarte school, where emotions have precise but simple gestures to represent them, or a Meyerhold biomechanic. And yes, I am dramatic in the sense that almost nothing I do or say is done or said casually or conversationally, without imaginary footlights and a sense of rehearsal.

Those writers who strive to make every utterance sound realistic fail miserably one hundred percent of the time. Am I exaggerating and being dramatic? Perhaps, but it’s a belief at the foundation of my craft. Look at a transcript of even the most articulate, eloquent conversation between two intelligent, passionate speakers, and it’s baffling, incoherent, wearying. Or a transcript of two ignorant assholes: no idea what the point is or what’s at stake or why they are bothering to speak. It’s not revolutionary to note at this point that “realism” is every bit as artificial as, say, “surrealism” is. Each has conventions that, if relied upon, weaken the story, sicken the reader, and, eventually kill whatever interest may have been kindled at the start. The written word bears only a superficial relation to the spoken word. The very greatest literary artists can make that relation profound, but they have to make it. Make is the important word there: writers are makers. Everyone on the planet speaks—almost nobody on the planet is a writer. When James Wood makes sport of Rick Moody’s ridiculous denunciation of realism, what a writer must keep foremost in mind is not: “James Wood and realism are good,” or “Rick Moody’s wish to ‘kick realism in the ass’ is bad,” but that pretending to be honest and alive by characterizing your work as realistic is just as fraudulent as a politician posing as “an ordinary guy,” or “one of the people,” or whatever term of bullshit is currently fashionable.

Most important to me is the feeling that there are inner voices, or as you put it, idealized voices, in every grunt and whimper and fashionable locution that a human being can make. A baby is privy to everything in the human condition that an old man is. The da-da-goo-goo and the strangled whisper are the tips of the iceberg. A writer offers the whole iceberg. If the iceberg doesn’t seem realistic, well, jeez, that’s reality’s problem, not the writer’s.

Cadence, the careful rise and fall of it, is embedded in to so much of your dialogue. What rhythms do you hear in your head? Where do they materialize from, and how do they get from your head to the page?

It’s not that I hear a kind of rhythm, or kinds, but that I hear rhythm at all and think it essential to prose. Rhythm in music, in poetry: goes without saying. But the idea that narrative prose depends on it too is less easy to assert. Maybe this is another aspect, to return to your first question, of "being dramatic": everything I hear, from the blades of my fan to the clink of cutlery in a café to La Mer and Richard Burton reading the phonebook, seems like a performance to me.

What, for instance, is stuck in your head right now?

Shakespeare. Blank verse fulmination. Latin oratory weaving in and out of Anglo-Saxon grunting. Fugues, as in Bach, as in Beckett. Comedians, especially Groucho Marx (especially Groucho imitating Eugene O’Neill a la Strange Interlude), but comedians in general: bitter intensity giving way suddenly to silliness and vice versa. Demanding that people laugh at you. Sadness mocked only to return in angry hilarity. Angry hilarity forgetting what it was saying, repeating, fading, being washed out to sea in an allargando. Anything but a sales pitch, the rhythm of the hard sell, fraudulent bullshit: David Mamet can have it. There’s not a moment of true feeling in it, and true feeling is the only way you can significantly alter the rhythm of artificial speech, of rhetoric. The rhythm of selling is monotonous—and it permeates American fiction. Really, everything I find moving or influential or delightful in English goes back to Elizabethan Anarchism.

Whose dialogue do you admire—I mean, specifically, whose fiction do you read for the dialogue? Does any of it get lodged in your head?

Thomas McGuane and Malcolm Lowry leap immediately to mind as writers who have a particular genius for rendering the sort of conversation that seems highly (and often hysterically) unlikely and yet as naturally convincing as something you overhear in a café, or some primary interfacial zone of customer-service. The beginning of Under the Volcano, for instance, has two friends of the novel’s alcoholic hero, Geoffrey Firmin, discussing Firmin’s suffering. One is French, the other Mexican, and they are speaking English: “…we got so horrible drunkness that night before, so perfectamente borracho [accent on the mente] that it seems to me the Consul [Firmin] is as sick as I am. Sickness is not only in body but in that part used to be call: soul. Poor your friend he spend his money on earth in such continuous tragedies.” In the middle of Ninety-two in the Shade, McGuane has his hero getting bailed out of jail by his father, who is more disapproving of his son’s request for Apollinaire to read while incarcerated than the incarceration itself: “Those frog lunatics have produced a generation of destructive addlepates to which I fear you appending yourself. Though I’d prefer it to your fiddling with dope, it’s a narrow choice.” Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote ten or twenty novels apiece which are almost completely composed in dialogue: matchless, incredible, death-defying work. But if I had to choose one brief exchange, it would come from Barry Hannah’s “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb”: a confederate cavalryman is about to shoot a union soldier who thought he was dead:

“Say wise things to me or die, patriot,” I said.
“But but but but but but,” he said.
“Shh!” I said. “Let nobody else hear. Only me. Tell me the most exquisite truth you know.”
He paled and squirmed.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
A stream of water came out the cuff of his pants.
“I’ve soiled myself, you gray motherfucker,” said the old guy.
“Get on with it. No profanity necessary,” I said.
“I believe in Jehovah, the Lord; in Jesus Christ, his son; and in the Holy Ghost. I believe in the trinity of God’s bride, the church. To be honest. To be square with your neighbor. To be American and free,” he said.
“I asked for truths, not beliefs,” I said.
“But I don’t understand what you mean,” said the shivering home guard. “Give me an example.”
“You’re thrice as old as I. You should give me the examples. For instance: Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.”
“I’m better because I know I’m better,” he said.
I said, “I’ve read darwin and floundered in him. You give me aid, old man. Find your way out of this forest. Earn your life back for your trouble.”
“Don’t shoot me. They’ll hear the shot down there and come blow you over.”

You studied at The Playwrights’ Center, and had several plays produced before turning to fiction. Who would you rather write dialogue for--actors or fictional characters? Was it more satisfying to hear your dialogue spoken on stage, or do you prefer to manipulate it for the page?

I didn’t really “study” at the Playwrights’ Center: that was the first and last time I received a grant, and my only obligation, my only occupation was to write plays and listen to the plays my fellows wrote. Had I actually studied, I might have been a better playwright and consequently been more able to enjoy actors speaking words I’d written. As it was, I could barely stand it. Of course I blamed the actors and “theater” at first, but I blame myself now, completely. I have studied since then and desire, like a character in a fairy tale desires, to write a play again and see it performed. But if I had to give up the page to do so, I wouldn’t. My fiction is filled with actors and acting, and maybe that’s the best of both worlds. I don’t know. The Playwrights’ Center, in the early eighties, was fecund ground. Two other Jerome Fellows (that’s what the grant was called, a Jerome Fellowship) in residence the years I was there were Lee Blessing, who had a show on Broadway, and August Wilson, of whom I need say nothing except rest in peace. Lee and August both worked very hard at the craft, while I was content to show off my verbal skills. I remember very clearly seeing the first draft of August’s Jitney: it was a thousand times longer than it is now, the characters just could not, would not, shut up, and of course that was the strength of the thing at the same time it was a weakness. My friend John Richardson, one of the great unsung minds of American drama, sat down with August and they carved the thing up. It was like flaying August alive, for months, but he learned how to work his voice for the stage.

The world of Gary Amdahl is inhabited by lively characters with thick accents. We get Chicago mobsters, Russian intellectuals, Minnesotan hockey players, a taste of Brooklyn (“co-eld”), and an Australian ("free bee-ah"), to name a few. Furthermore, your narrators often fall in and out of impersonations, "British clipped," southern—different affectations for different moods. Why the obsession?

Again we return to Q1 and the idea of “a dramatic person.” I make faces and use funny voices all day long, all night long, in my dreams and e-mail, talking to friends and foes. I’m a helpless mimic (it’s gotten me in serious trouble) and I suppose I can’t help but write that way too.

You are stuck in traffic in downtown Cairo. Zahma—a blockage. The cars are packed in impossibly thick and there is only the slightest of forward movement. Pedestrians squeeze their way through hairline fractures between the metal, which adds to the congestion. A ride that could have taken fifteen minutes takes two hours. Time loses its sense of forward momentum; one becomes philosophical. This is a common occurrence.

It is tempting to derive larger lessons from Cairene zahma. There is something about breaking rules that is inherent to Cairo—you drive the wrong way down a one way street or race through red lights, you push ahead in line, you don’t fast during Ramadan, you write things you shouldn’t on your blog or publish something that can land you in jail. Living within zahma, both traffic blockages and political ones, can make you patient, or exasperated, or depressed. Or you may risk the short cut, the perils be damned.

At the center of downtown Cairo, maybe one hundred meters from Tahrir Square, on the second floor of a dingy office building on Qasr al-Nil Avenue, there is a space to breathe. The offices of Dar Merit, a small independent publishing house founded in 1998, informal and rough around the edges, pry an opening in the zahma and perhaps a foothold from which to escape it.

During the past decade, a generation of young writers who are breaking lots of rules—of what writing in Arabic is supposed to look like, of what young Egyptians can express about the world around them and how they might do so, and of what a new cohort of men and women might say about life in a city layered with centuries, even millennia, of intertwined cultural forms—has marked a significant shift in contemporary Egyptian literature.

Merit has been at the center of this scene, and its founder and publisher, Mohammed Hashem, its impresario. An unpretentious uncle figure, modest patron, cheerleader, and jovial fellow traveler to a loose circle of young renegade writers, Hashem—who himself was active in Kefaya—has been celebrated as a publisher for pushing the limits of what can be said and who will stand up for it in public. (In 2006, the Association of American Publishers awarded him the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award for his “commitment to freedom of expression in an environment where such a commitment is hazardous.”)

In the front room, which is open to the public, two walls of Merit’s books are displayed for sale, though it is rare that anyone comes in to shop. There are a small number of sociological and political essays on display, but for the most part Merit’s list is dominated by literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and the occasional volume of ‘ammiyya (Egyptian Arabic dialect) poetry.

It’s tempting to call the smoky back room a literary salon, except that there are no organized discussions as you might find elsewhere in Cairo. Instead, a hodgepodge of personalities drop by—everyone seems to have published a book or two or a weekly column or a page in a newspaper—to slump in the thread worn couches and smoke and joke and talk for a while at the end of the day. Ever the host, Hashem provides the lentils and the Turkish coffee, or whatever his writers and guests may require. Mostly he provides the space—physical and on the page—to keep the conversation going. When asked, Hashem credits Kefaya with the inspiration for his commitment to cross all the red lines: “A commitment to the truth equals the dissemination of all ideas without restriction. Freedom is supposed to know no bounds,” Hashem told a reporter in 2006.

For most American readers, the phrase “Egyptian literature” likely brings to mind one of two writers: Naguib Mahfouz, the prolific master of Arabic prose, and, as of a couple of years ago, Alaa Al Aswany. Mahfouz, the 1988 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is the better known of course, especially for his Cairo trilogy from the 1950s, with its epic sweep and intertwined sense of the city’s urban space and historical and psychological change. Aswany burst onto the American scene in 2006 (the same year that Mahfouz passed away) with his first novel The Yacoubian Building. Originally published in Arabic in 2002 by Merit, Aswany’s melodramatic tale of intertwined lives in contemporary Cairo quickly became the best selling Arabic language novel in the world, followed and further propelled by a successful Egyptian film and a tv miniseries. Aswany, in his fifties and a founding member of Kefaya, has played the role of literary author as political and social commentator—in both the Egyptian and international press—with energy and aplomb. But for American audiences, it seems more simply that he has served as an alternative to Mahfouz.

The work of the young authors collected here, however, is quite different from either Mahfouz or Al Aswany. This is as true formally as it is socially or politically. The authors in this portfolio have read and cherished their masters—Egyptian ones and foreigners alike. Their influences are multiple, their sense of form unpredicted or unanticipated.

These writers are a generation that came of age with (sometimes after) the massive arrival of the Internet and digital technologies in Cairo, and in the wake of the shift in global discourse about big words like democracy, Islam, and war. And while many of the topics they address in their work seem much smaller—a sexual liaison, street children stealing fruit, women calling on each other for tea, two boys playing a video game—these are not writers unconcerned with the social or the political. Rather, their work is conceived differently in relation to the big questions. Perhaps it is the enormity of Cairo, expanding at asymptotic rates via apparently uncontrollable urbanization, or the response to its social and political zahma; or perhaps they echo others in their generation internationally who have become cynical about what art and writing can do and seek something different. But the big pronouncements here are more muted or ironic…and sometimes they are even refused.

Over the course of the past several months, I have visited Merit’s offices frequently, usually late in the evening when things start to pick up. One such evening this past March seems paradigmatic, but there were others—watching the finals of the Confederations Cup in June when Brazil came from behind to beat the U.S., to the joy of those in attendance. Or in late August during Ramadan when, after Iftar, the regulars drifted in.

On that evening in March, I sat in the back room of the Merit offices with Ahmed Alaidy, a thirty- four year old novelist and poet who broke open the Egyptian novel with his cyberpunk Being Abbas el Abd. In that frenetic first novel, Alaidy brought emoticons into his Arabic prose, along with a flood of references to pop culture and the empty fullness of life in digital Cairo. Alaidy has written comics and screenplays and counts among his mentors (or “partners in crime,” as he puts it) the American Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), the British comic geniusAlan Moore (Watchmen), and the Egyptian literary titan Sonallah Ibrahim. Alaidy’s conversation circulates rapidly between the latest movies, American comics and world literature, and then about the imagination and art without embarrassment.

Sitting with us were two young women (twenty and twenty-four), one just graduated from Cairo University, the other finishing her exams, who keep the website and the Facebook pages current with photos from book signings and announcements of literary events. Mohammed Hashem, exhausted from yet another all-nighter, sat at his cluttered desk behind an aging PC, pecking at the keyboard, while the interns threw jokes and double entendres around, teasing their boss, teasing Alaidy, filling the air with more laughter.

The electronic doorbell chirped every few minutes. In drifted Khalid Kassab, the wildly popular editor of Darbet Shams (Sunstroke), a two page cultural insert in Dustour (one of Cairo’s more prominent oppositional dailies). As we sat chatting, text messages came in constantly from his readers: “Life without Darbet Shams is like Cairo without ruz b-libn (rice pudding),” says one. “Please come back!” Kassab had just announced that after upwards of four years writing for the paper, culminating in the insert, he was moving on to new ventures. But his readers can’t let him go. Kassab’s columns—spiritual, funny, colloquial, dark and hopeful all at once—were a phenomenon, and Darbet Shams was somehow more than the sum of its parts. While it lasted, it was a space for young writers to make a name for themselves; to write freely about topics that had seemed off limits; to negotiate their own relationship to Cairo and the world around them. The phenomenon had such a recognizable identity that its writers—and its dedicated readers—became known as Darbetshamsawis, i.e., Sunstrokers.

Ten minutes later, Omar Taher wandered in, sullen and pensive. Taher is just as young as the others but slightly chubby and balding, with a more serious demeanor to match. He looks the part of the mentor that Alaidy has cast him in. Alaidy raves about Taher’s manifesto that opens his book Shaklaha bazet (Looks like it’s falling apart): “It’s possible that this book will not represent anything of importance to you, but it will mean a lot to you if you are one of the children of the generation.” Alaidy assures me that I can’t imagine how much those four pages meant to him.

If Kassab was the literary force behind Darbet Shams, Taher may be the intellectual —or poetic—heart of this generation. His manifesto, reminiscent of a catalog by Allen Ginsberg, defines his generation via a series of cultural and historical events that marked and formed their collective experience. The references are both highly local and global, both mediated through the “shock of multimedia” and the seismic change of the “communication revolution.” And so hilarious public service announcements and toothpaste commercials that only Cairenes would appreciate take their place next to global media events such as Princess Diana and Operation Desert Storm.

And, like Kassab and Alaidy, and echoed in the work of most of the other writers of this cohort, Taher writes in a vibrant and charged language that moves freely between formal Arabic and colloquial, everday Egyptian. (This is yet another way he and his peers are finding and energizing the new generation of Egyptian readers who have emerged with the impressive
expansion of literacy in the past decade or two.)

But to understand Taher—and the generation he is naming, summoning into being-one must understand him not (only) via the influence of popular culture but through what he follows in Egyptian literature. Indeed it is that fusion, or that confusion, of domestic and global, of local and cyber, that is both indicative of the writing of this generation—and perhaps difficult for an American audience to grasp. One must simplify perhaps to make the point. If we do so, we might say that the literary lions that ruled Cairo’s scene in the 1960s and 1970s—writers such as Mahfouz and Sonallah Ibrahim and Baha Taher and others, all of whom still stand for Egyptian literature—put social and political causes at the center of their literary projects, along with their great hope for the Egyptian nation and for a national literature and national consciousness. The sense of failure that followed in the wake of the succeeding decades did not halt the literary production of this generation, but put it in a different light for its successors. One begins to see a changed relationship in Egyptian writers toward the goals of the nation in the nineties. Egyptian commentators and scholars have characterized the so-called 1990s generation as writers who turned away from the social commitment of their predecessors and inwards, whether toward more avante-garde experimentation or a “bracketing of any social or political criticism,” as Richard Jacquemond has written recently.

But Taher’s and Alaidy’s generation, what I’m tentatively calling Cairo 2010, seems at once to be writing about the highly personal and the social and is distinct from the 1990s writers. Their experiences are different, as is the way they encounter and depict the Cairo of today, the globally inflected and locally congested space of the megalopolis. Mansoura Ez Eldin, an acclaimed novelist and the young book review editor of the literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab, speaks eloquently of this newest cohort and its departure from the concerns of the previous generations of Egyptian novelists. Some of it has to do with what they were reading and the ways in which the younger writers took more seriously popular culture and foreign forms. “We took these genres (horror, detective, graphic novels) seriously, and created work more cosmopolitan and less concerned with the old themes (of Arab identity, Egyptian nationalism, etc.).” She is thinking of the work of Alaidy, Taher, and Muhammad Aladdin, when she makes this comment to me in the café at Diwan bookstore in Zamalek, but it might apply as well to her own newest work. In Beyond Paradise, a muted, gorgeous tale of a young woman coming to terms with the ghosts of her past, Ez Eldin moves between the personal and the political quietly—magically—as one moves between dreams and reality.

Perhaps this interplay between the individual and the social is put most efficiently by Omar Taher. “I see the world through my own eyes, myself, and through my intimate relationships with others,” he told a reporter for Al-Ahram in 2005. “I really don’t care about politics. I am only interested in watching politicians—the way they behave and the way they treat ordinary people. Today there are no political theories in which you could have any faith. So I don’t really see the point...”

Taher isn’t renouncing the social—the way he calls his generation into collective being would demonstrate otherwise. Rather, his cynical understanding of politics in Egypt—that blockage, that zahma—leads him to approach it from another angle. “I sighed when I’d had enough,” he writes in a recent ‘ammiyya poem. How does one move through a wall of traffic? And for Taher, as for many of the writers of Cairo 2010, a rich admixture of literary and popular culture, from at home and abroad, offers ways to reimagine just what it means to be a subject in today’s Cairo. What is left after one has confronted an authoritarian state in the streets and shouted Enough!?

Certainly in “The Parkour War,” a collaboration by Ahmed Alaidy and Magdy El Shafee, layers of social critique are hinted at in the bleak frames of a Cairene urban landscape, and then shifted abruptly into amediascape. In Alaidy and El Shafee’s fiction, working within the transnational codes of comics, the pop cultural form allows for ironic social critique on at least two levels. The first frames demonstrate the same unflinching portrayal of Cairene corruption that
landed El Shafee’s pathbreaking graphic novel Metro in the courtroom on charges of “infringement of public decency.” (El Shafee and his publisher are still on trial with the risk of prison time, forbidden to leave the country; Metro is still censored.) But then social commentary such as we might have expected from the older literary generation—though never looking like this!—cedes to a critique of the apathy and immobility of the youngest Cairenes, stuck behind Xboxes and flipping through tv channels—in the very language they would understand.

In the other contributions included in this portfolio, a variety of stances toward that interplay of individual desire and social collectivity are discovered. Whether in the mysteries of Muhammad Aladdin’s taboo-breaking tale of desire and sexuality in urban Cairo or in Mohamed Al- Fakhrany’s postmodern novel of street children fighting to survive outside the five-star hotels and luxury night club boats anchored on the Nile, or again in Ibrahim El Batout’s moving and politically chilling feature film Ain Shams, the authors and artists of the generation of the 2000s are especially agile in shifting registers, of seeing in the close up detail a more shattering meaning that reverberates through that densely packed city.

And as they do so, the bridges and gaps between reality and representation we find so richly explored here promise to bring us into a new space within the impossibly crowded city. Cairo, in all its complexity, with all its millions of unheard people—at once bleak, saturated from a thousand directions, and disruptive—is opened up for a moment by the authors after Kefaya.