YAHYA TAHER ABDULLAH was born in the village of Karnak in 1938 and moved to Cairo in 1964‎,‎ where he became known for his virtuoso oral performances of his stories‎.‎ He published in the leading reviews of the day and became a prominent figure in the circle of writers known as the Generation of the Sixties‎.‎ He died in a car accident in the Western Desert in 1981 at the age of 43‎.‎ He is the author of four novellas ‎(‎of which The Collar and the Bracelet was made into a major motion picture‎,‎ directed by Khairy Bishara‎)‎ and five collections of short stories‎.‎ A collection of his stories‎,‎ The Mountain of Green Tea‎,‎ translated by Denys Johnson‎-Davies‎,‎ was published by the AUC Press in 1999‎.‎ SAMAH SELIM is a translator and scholar of modern Arabic literature living in France‎.‎ She is associate researcher at IREMAM in Aix‎-en‎-Provence‎.‎ Her most recent translation is Memories of a Meltdown‎:‎ An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl by Mohamed Makhzangi ‎(‎AUC Press‎,‎ 2006‎)‎‎.‎