One of theWall Street Journal'sTop 10 Books of the Year

Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category

Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award

Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category


Fifty rogues tales translated fifty ways

An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together inImpostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature.

Imposturesfollows the roguish Ab Zayd al-Sarj in his adventures around the medieval Middle Eastwe encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English.

Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics,Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation.

An English-only edition.

al-arr (Author)
Al-arr (d. 516/1122) was a poet, scholar, and government official from Basra, Iraq. He is celebrated for his virtuosity in producing rhymed prose narratives, theMaqmt.

Abdelfattah Kilito (Foreword by)
Abdelfattah Kilito is the author of several acclaimed studies of Arabic literature, including Arabs and the Art of Storytellingand a study of themaqmt genre. He is the recipient of the Great Moroccan Award, the Al Owais Award for Criticism and Literature Studies, and a Prix from the Académie Française.

Michael Cooperson (Translator)
Michael Coopersonis Professor of Arabic in the Department of Near Eastern Languages& Cultures at UCLA. His translations includeThe Life of Ibnanbal by Ibn al-Jawz for the Library of Arabic Literature, andThe Author and His Doubles by the eminent Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito.