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AUC Press Publishes Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s Compelling The Men Who Swallowed The Sun

Hoopoe, an imprint of AUC Press, has just released Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s The Men Who Swallowed the Sun, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies. Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony, this is a novel of two men and their fellow migrants, and the extreme marginalization that drives them.

Hamdi Abu Golayyel is an Egyptian writer and a journalist, born in Fayoum. He is the author of numerous short story collections and novels, including Thieves in Retirement and A Dog with No Tail, which was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2008.

Golayyel has already received much praise for his previous novels. “A clever and complex meditation . . . full of swift sarcasm . . . an exploration of Abu Golayyel’s Bedouin identity,” wrote reporter, essayist, and book reviewer Ursula Lindsey in Egypt Independent about A Dog with No Tail. Mona Zaki, reviewer and translator of modern Arabic fiction, described Thieves in Retirement as “a great read” while the Library Journal called it “masterful.”

The Men Who Swallowed the Sun follows two Bedouin men from Egypt’s Western Desert who seek to escape poverty through different routes. One—the intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdi—gets no further than southern Libya’s oasis of Sabha, while his cousin—the dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raider—makes it to the fleshpots of Milan.

The backdrop of this darkly comic story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafi’s Great State of the Masses, where Gaddafi fantasizes about welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin. Like A Dog with No Tail, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun works at the boundary of memoir and fiction, using experimental prose techniques to foreground the unreliability of the narrator and of memory.

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Founded in 1919, The American University in Cairo (AUC) is a leading English-language, American- accredited institution of higher education and center of the intellectual, social, and cultural life of the Arab world. It is a vital bridge between East and West, linking Egypt and the region to the world through scholarly research, partnerships with academic and research institutions and study abroad programs. 

The University offers 39 undergraduate, 52 master’s and two PhD programs rooted in a liberal arts education that encourages students to think critically and find creative solutions to conflicts and challenges facing both the region and the world. 

An independent, nonprofit, politically non-partisan, non-sectarian and equal opportunity institution, AUC is fully accredited in Egypt and the United States.