Readers interested in how a particular work fits into the broader arabophone literary scene will appreciate Elmarsafy’s thorough indexing, while those familiar with Arabic will also appreciate lengthy quotations from the original works in over 60 pages of endnotes. The volume has a helpful bibliography including plentiful French-language scholarship on Arabic literature, fiction, and literary theory more generally. Elmarsafy is to be commended on the ambitious project to encompass a large geographic expanse, and his selections are meant to be illustrative rather than encyclopedic. The work is meticulously detailed; hence, a reader new to the field would necessarily read this work alongside a more introductory survey of trends in modern Arabic fiction.

- Celene Ayat Lizzio, Brandeis University, Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Elmarsafy brings together an illustrative spectrum of seminal Arab authors, and ably illuminates the persistence of Sufi idioms and voices in contemporary literary texts. He argues convincingly that these appropriations are intricately linked not only to questions of besieged national identities and ideological bankruptcy, but perhaps more pressingly to aspects of the journey of the self, the limits of the language and form of the novel, and ultimately, the very habitability of the world of the writer.

- Samia Mehrez, Professor of Arabic Literature, American University in Cairo,