The Book of Sleep

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 unravelling 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 which combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.