The Book of Sleep

by Haytham El Wardany, Robin Moger (Translator)

Overview

Now in paperback, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature.

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death’s shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?

Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.

“My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking,” El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857429537
Publisher:	Seagull Books
Publication date:	11/14/2021
Series:	The Arab List
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Haytham El Wardany is an Egyptian writer of short stories and experimental prose who lives and works in Berlin. Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic prose and poetry based in Cape Town, South Africa. 

Table of Contents

Introduction • 1
The Kingdom of Things • 3
The First Law • 5
The Sleeping Space • 7
The Heart of the Homes • 9
The Reassured • 11
The Delicacy of Radicalism • 13
The Principle of Hope • 15
A Real Battle • 17
Waste • 19
A Breath • 21
The Time of Return • 23
A Story before Sleep • 24
A Technique • 27
Coma • 29
Gas • 31
An Absense • 33
A Wondrous Device • 35
The Phoenix • 36
All Night Long • 37
The Language of Pain • 39
In the Heart of the Night • 41
The World ’s Back • 42
One Endless Day • 44
Anonymous • 45
Zero Point • 46
The Seventh Waking • 47
The Morals of a Cat • 49
A River Within • 51
A Call • 53
Breaking Bonds • 55
Morning Sleeplessness • 57
A Hidden Force • 59
Who Is the Sleeper? • 62
Who Is the Sleeper? • 63
Who Is the Sleeper? • 65
We Set a Trap • 66
A Bond of Unrelation • 68
A Shared Absence • 69
The Hanging Garden • 71
New Land • 73
A Patch of Shadow • 76
Long Practice • 78
A Leap in the Air • 80
What Happens When We Sleep? • 82
The Structure of the Abyss • 83
Run Dry • 85
Barzakh • 87
Seashell • 88
A Desert Island • 90
Power • 92
Underground • 94
The Unsleeping Eye • 96
Emergency Law • 98
Golden Locks • 100
A New Life • 102
The People of the Cave • 103
The Squatting Beast • 105
A Strange Language • 107
The Tongue of Flame • 109
Subaltern • 111
A Mixture • 113
Beneath the Pillow • 115
A Meadow • 117
A Daily Threshold • 119
The Daily Abyss • 121
The City on a Hill • 123
New Cities • 125
He Enters a Neighbourhood • 127
He Enters a Neighbourhood • 129
The Names • 131
A Matter of Listening • 133
Your Voice • 135
Tuning • 136
Eloquence • 138
Bliss • 141
Starless • 143
The Discreet Charm of the Proletariat • 144
An Exchange • 146
Little Heart • 148
A Thread • 150
The Function of the Author • 151
Writing • 153
Fetishization • 154
A Second Birth • 156
An Absent Party • 158
Flesh and Blood • 160

Editorial Reviews

"The Book of Sleep encourages its readers to let the eyes of the tyrants grow bloodshot and heavy and dry as they toss and turn, bored and restless because their subjects are sleeping, like a field of contented potatoes, snuggled under the dirt, serving for nothing and thus useless to the tyrant, but secretly dreaming a different history into becoming."

4Columns

"Sleep is a state that, the writer Haytham El Wardany contends in The Book of Sleep, is replete with luminous, electric, even radical activity. "

Pioneer Works

"El Wardany invites us to consider poetry in its broadest possible sense, as an enervation armed with the logic of metaphor rather than cause-and-effect, which manifests not only in lines, in the streets. Lived universally, sleep and dream have the potential to open us to the collective unconscious and dissolve the limitations of the self under capitalism."

Full Stop