I found myself… the last dreams, Naguib Mahfouz (New Directions, 2025)

Translated from Arabic and with an introduction by Hisham Matar

Photographs by Diana Matar

In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These stunning poetic vignettes—now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed writer Hisham Matar—appear here with fantastical dreamlike photographs by the photographer Diana Matar that mysteriously evoke and open up Mahfouz’s nocturnal reveries, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn. In the haunting miniatures of I Found Myself …, recurring female characters, one much-missed lover from Mahfouz’s youth in particular, seem to embody Cairo herself. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women float through these affecting, brief tales dreamed by a mind too creative to go silent, even at rest. A tender, personal introduction by Hisham, recollecting how he and Diana met Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo not long after an assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.

Of the nearly forty novels of NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (1911–2006), the most famous is The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of the novels In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance, and the memoirs The Return, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in New York and London. 

Diana Matar devotes years to projects that capture the unseen traces of human history. Her photography explores how aesthetics influences the portrayal of power as it acts on individuals, nature, and society. She is the author of two acclaimed monographs: Evidence (2014) and My America (2024). My America was nominated for the Tim Hetherington Grant, longlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award and finalist in Photo España books of the year. Matar’s work has been exhibited in more than 30 international institutions and is held in the collections of Tate Modern, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Victoria & Albert Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, British Museum amongst many others. Her honors include a Ford Foundation Grant, the International Fund for Documentary Photography Award, the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art, and two Arts Council England Grants. She is represented by Purdy Hicks Gallery and serves as Professor of Professional Practice at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Alexander Dumbadze in conversation with Cameron Martin

A defining figure of the 1970s–80s New York art world, Jack Goldstein’s wide-ranging body of work, which included immaculate color films and radiant paintings of appropriated images composed by assistants, is both seductive and interpretively elusive. Goldstein’s legacy has been complicated by the mythology of his later years. Consumed by drug addiction, he dropped out of the art world in the 1990s, lived alone in an East Los Angeles trailer park, and resurfaced in a wave of critical fanfare at the turn of the millennium, before taking his own life in 2003.

Employing his signature blend of biography, theoretical reflection, and archival research, Alexander Dumbadze examines Goldstein’s life and career, homing in on the artist’s refusal to distinguish between mental and actual images. Progressing chronologically through key moments in Goldstein’s artistic and intellectual formation, the book offers a deeply complex portrait of this significant artist, along with a nuanced meditation on the nature of images, the meaning of artistic subjectivity, and the consequences of holding unwavering faith in art. 

Alexander Dumbadze is an Associate Professor of Art History at George Washington University. He is the author of Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and co-author and co-editor of Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Cameron Martin is an artist whose paintings, drawings and collages have been exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe and Japan. He received his BA in Art/Semiotics from Brown University and went on to study at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his work is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York.