And in a post-September 11 world looking for a window on the Middle East, it is significant that Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building is also a novel about Egypt that has been translated into English.

Increasingly, writers, readers and publishers are turning to literature as a bridge between cultures, particularly Western and Arab societies estranged since Muslim extremists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Recent years have seen the arrival of a website devoted to translating fiction and new grants for literary translations.

Last year, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest of its kind in the world, chose the Arab world as its ``guest of honor,'' giving several hundred Arab writers and intellectuals an unprecedented chance to exchange ideas with their Western counterparts and meet publishers and agents.

Those involved in the push say the publisher of The Yacoubian Building, the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press, is an inspiration. AUC Press has been publishing Arabic literature in translation for 20 years - its backlist of some 100 novels represents one of the largest troves of modern Arabic literature in English in the world.

In the mid-1980s, it pioneered English versions of the work of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 and remains the only Arab so honored. The press has since published 25 of his novels, and Mahfouz has written that its translations, along with those that followed in other languages, introduced him to the world and ``were among the foremost reasons for my being awarded the Nobel prize.''

The newest entry in the AUC Press catalog is The Yacoubian Building, a provocative survey of the social and political pressures of the present that have many Egyptians looking nostalgically to their more tolerant and hopeful past.

Yacoubian has been a best-seller since it appeared in Arabic in 2002. Author Al Aswany says the English version may help the world understand the political stagnation and corruption that frustrates Arabs, leading some to extremism and violence. Al Aswany says he writes in the spirit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and quotes the Colombian Nobel literature laureate and journalist as saying: ``If you have a really important issue and you believe in it, write a good novel about it.''

But Al Aswany is quick to add that novels can't stand on politics alone.

``You write about the people. Your challenge is to understand people, or to make people understandable to the readers,'' he says.

Yacoubian is slim, but richly peppered with complex characters, all living or working in the grand but faded downtown Cairo building of the title. Heartless politicians and mean-spirited bureaucrats. A young woman who is forced to give up her virginity, but manages to hold on to an innocent faith in her fellow man. A young man whose soul is destroyed when he is raped by the police.

In Al Aswany's tale, as in life, suffering does not necessarily ennoble. His characters are capable of love and loyalty, but also of hatred and prejudice.

Reading a novel from another culture may not be an entirely easy experience - but that's what makes it rewarding, says Humphrey Davies, who translated Yacoubian. He says foreign readers may be taken aback, for example, by Al Aswany's sometimes clumsy portrayal of a gay character.

``It adds to the fertile tension both within the book and between the reader and the text itself,'' Davies says.

AUC Press' English version of Yacoubian sold out its first printing of 3,000 within months of appearing late last year. By US publishing standards, 3,000 may not impress, but AUC Press director Mark Linz calls it a solid debut for a translated novel.

The press, which also acts as an agent for its authors, has been finding it easier lately to interest other foreign-language publishers in Arabic writers, Linz says.

``Obviously, 9/11 and everything that came thereafter increased the interest,'' Linz says. Much of that interest, he adds, comes from people wondering how they can encourage social and political development in the Middle East. ``You can't do that without understanding the culture,'' Linz says. ``So, we're making a contribution to that debate and that discussion.''

The debate cannot be left to the politicians, says Peter Ripken, director of the Frankfurt-based Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature and one of the organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair's Arab edition.

``There are very few [Arab politicians] who are genuinely democrats. Whatever they say has to be taken with a grain of salt,'' he says.

``In this situation, people turn to poets, they turn to storytellers. They are portraying much more of what matters than the politicians are.''

Ripken says AUC Press is ``an exceptional enterprise'' because it doesn't just publish Arab writers. It promotes them, too, and it has a higher profile in Europe than other US university presses that publish translations.

When the American wing of the international writers group PEN began planning a forum on international writers, it turned to the AUC Press catalog as a kind of directory to Arab writers, says Esther Allen, head of the PEN American Center's translation committee.

AUC Press has ``been at the forefront of publishing Arab literature in English,'' she says.

It has been joined by such publishers as Ibis Editions, founded in Jerusalem in 1998 and publishing literature of, and about, the Middle East in translation from Arabic, Hebrew and other languages.

There is also the Words Without Borders website, which debuted last year to feature work in translation.

``In an increasingly interdependent world, rife with ignorance and incomprehension of other cultures, literature in translation has an especially important role,'' the site notes.

PEN's Allen recalls that when United Nations experts reported in 2002 that only 330 books from any language were translated into Arabic every year, it was pointed to as proof of the Arab world's backwardness and isolation. Allen wrote to Harper's magazine that ``if translation is a prime indicator of cultural vibrancy, then the United States was in even bigger trouble than the Arab world.'' She cited a National Endowment for the Arts study that found that of the more than 10,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999, only 300 were translations from any language.

An anonymous donor, citing Allen's letter in Harper's, established a US$730,000 (HK$5.69 million) endowment for PEN to award grants of up to US$10,000 to help translators into English complete work, find publishers and publicize the results.

Since the fund was established in 2003, 10 grants have been awarded for projects in a number of languages, including a collection by Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail translated by Elizabeth Winslow and soon to be published by New Directions.

In a similar spirit, the Association of American Publishers last year offered grants of US$10,000 to help American publishers interested in bringing out English translations of three Iranian novels. AUC Press has also been a pioneer in prize-giving, establishing the annual Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996 to recognize outstanding Arabic writing, and publishes an English translation of each medal winner.

However, for all the prizes, new publishers and digital forums - and AUC's 20 years of publishing - the challenge remains daunting. The UN cultural organization has determined that while 50 percent of all translations published worldwide are from English, only 6 percent are into English. The huge American market is seen as driving the imbalance.

With author appearances key to book sales, US publishers may be reluctant to take a risk on an author who would need a translator at book signings - if he or she could come to the US at all. In a world of lightweight best-sellers, committing to a work of serious literature is risky enough without the added hoops of arranging foreign rights and finding a translator. It's particularly a leap of faith for an editor who speaks only English.

Whatever the reason, the result is a ``kind of a one-way mirror between America and the rest of the world,'' Will Schwalbe, editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books in New York, says.

``They get to see what we're doing, but we don't get to see what they're doing,'' says Schwalbe, a member of the Association of American Publishers committee that offered the grants for translating Iranian novels.

Roger Allen, who teaches Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania and has translated Mahfouz for AUC Press, worries that the sudden interest in Arabic literature won't last. He remembers the optimism that Mahfouz's Nobel would open the door to other Arabic writers. But today, Allen says, Mahfouz remains the main internationally known Arabic writer, and even he is known narrowly.

Bookstores in the US rarely stock more than Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, a masterful, realistic account of life in Cairo and of a merchant family in the mid-20th century. Western readers likely know little of his more experimental work, his daring political and religious allegories, even his historical dramas.

The curiosity about the Middle East sparked in the aftermath of September 11 could be overwhelmed by anger at Arabs and Muslims, says Allen, who fears Islam is being demonized, and ``the process of saying, `It's not like that, read this Arabic novel and see,' doesn't get very far.''

Egyptian author Al Aswany, though, is confident his novel in translation can find a receptive audience. Al Aswany, who taught himself Spanish so he could read Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, seems to imagine everyone is as interested in the literature of other cultures as he. And though he criticizes American foreign policy as reckless and pro-Israeli, three years studying dentistry in Chicago left him with a fondness for Americans.

One winter morning, he recalls, the fierce Chicago wind snatched his master's thesis from his hands. It was back in the days before everyone had computer backups.

``In the snow, cars stopped and people were running to collect the papers. People I didn't know. This was the real America,'' Al Aswany says. Americans ``can understand the problems of other people.''