My work made sense when I was drawing schematics and performing calculations, but understanding people and talking to them was admittedly not a skill I possessed.

This excerpt is from Naguib Mahfouz’s The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, a parable-like short novel published in Arabic in 1983; the English translation is forthcoming this year from Doubleday.

The ancient Egyptians believed there were seven parts to the soul which all behaved in different fashion after one’s death, some departing quickly, others resting within the body to emerge at the appropriate hour. The Ka, or Double, of the dead man, for example, did not usually present himself until the mummy was resting in his tomb some seventy days and more after death.

About four weeks after I took the Vow, I had become so marooned in the repetitions of Raymond James Burns’s course in World Communism that I made the mistake

The war had closed much of the city, cut off many of the smaller towns. Unable to trace his usual routes, the hat merchant headed into the mountains to try his luck. His father, before he died, had circled a small mountain village on his map, had noted that the trading was good but the trip took two difficult days. Indeed, the snaking road narrowed fast, and the bridge was down to splinters so his horse had to wade to the knees.

Near sunset of the first day, long after the road had turned to an overgrown path, the merchant passed a plain young woman milking a cow. She asked him into her farmhouse for bread and brandy but never turned her back on him. She didn’t turn her back to cut the bread, to call for her mother, to find a glass. He imagined she’d met her share of passing soldiers who wanted more than drink.

  Eleonora was an Umbrian girl whom the portiere’s wife had brought up to the Agostinis’ first-floor apartment after their two unhappy experiences with Italian maids, not long after they had arrived in Rome from Chicago.

He no longer can depend on the mail because the mailman takes his time. His sweet time, he thinks, which he feels justified in thinking since he’s seen the guy in action. The mailman’s movements are 

The break had been going on for who knows how long; time was passing by unchecked. The men opened their notebooks, leafed through them noiselessly, shifted their behinds on the school benches, sharpened

My wife, Gin, once knocked gently on my head, as if it were a door. “Hello,” she kept saying. “Hello. Who’s in there?” She and our therapist, Dr. Sherby, laughed a little about this, so I did, too.

I used to be friendly with a kid called Sam Bamburger, whose mother was the first woman I ever heard of to get divorced. Sam was about nine at the time and up to that point something of an all-American