Echoes of an Autobiography

From the Foreword by Nadine Gordimer: "These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are--in the words of the title of one of the prose pieces--''The Dialogue of the Late Afternoon'' of his life. I don''t believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have matched what we have here."

With more than 500,000 c...