The first writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz’s novels helped bring Arabic literature to an international readership. This collection of his early writing, from his time as a student of philosophy, reveals the intellectual ferment of the young author, grappling with two millennia of philosophers and writers and establishing his own voice among them.

Available in English for the first time, these essays tackle a vast array of subjects, from Presocratic Philosophy to love and the sexual impulse. The intellectual development demonstrated here forms the foundation of Mahfouz’s literary work, granting insight into the mind behind such famed work as the Cairo Trilogy, and Children of The Alley.