Starting this week, Al-Ahram Weekly is expanding its arts coverage with an enlarged Listings section and a new focus on the world of entertainment

Home, sweet home Nehad Selaiha is fascinated and overwhelmed by Ahmad El-Attar's new play, Life is Beautiful, or Waiting for my Uncle from America

A prisoner of the mind This week Tawfiq El-Hakim's family commemorated his 13th death anniversary (26 July 1987). In the brief obituary they published, as unobtrusively as the average commemoration of Everyman, they also mentioned his 100th birth anniversary, an occasion that has been widely celebrated this week despite the fact that some sources point to 1897 or 1899 as the year of the author's birth. Below, Al-Ahram Weekly publishes extracts from El-Hakim's most widely read autobiography, The Prison of Life, in which he talks about his early life, his father's penchant for literature and the psychological prison in which he spent his days

Protoplasmic instrumentals David Blake enjoys a lute without the body Dream city By Nigel Ryan Plain talk By Mursi Saad El-Din Writing it out Youssef Rakha glosses over some recent literary highlights