Prologue: take them out of the ball game - Egypt's cultural players in crisis -- Dr Ramzi and Mr Sharaf: Sonallah Ibrahim and the duplicity of the literary field -- Children of our alley: the AUC Naguib Mahfouz award and the Egyptian literary field -- The big one: the intellectual and the political in modern Egyptian literary field -- The value of freedom: the writer against the establishment -- Lost in globalization: education and the stranded Egyptian elite -- Translating gender between the local and the global -- Where have all the families gone? Egyptian literary texts of the 1990s -- From the hara to the imara: emerging urban metaphors in the literary production on contemporary Cairo -- Taking the soap out of the opera: the case of Hagg Mitwalli's family -- The new kid on the block: Bahibb issima and the emergence of the Coptic community in the Egyptian public sphere -- Found in Cairo: the limits of representation in the visual field -- Literature and literalism: the Al-khubz al-hafi crisis reconsidered.