A useful little book, Straley's compendium is organized around the Arab authors for whom Websites already exist, with the stated intention of making it possible for undergraduate students to expand their access to Arab writers. The book is well thought‐out for the neophyte user as well as the teacher of Arab literature in translation.
The body of the work is an alphabetic list, based on Library of Congress standardized spelling, of Arab authors by name. Each entry begins with the author's name, and birth and death dates as available. The next entry is both unusual for this kind of reference book and totally in keeping with the theme of the work, in that the author annotations begin with one or more Websites dedicated to them, then supplemented with a short list of biography and criticism (in the case of well‐known authors this list is can run to two pages) and sometimes a list of translations if available. Some have as few as two entries, and others as many as 40. For example, “Mahfuz, Najib, 1912‐”, covers pages 112‐116. For some no translations are listed, so one assumes that none are as yet available.
Also very useful are the information listings preceding the body of main entries, as they allow readers to more quickly access those authors relevant to their particular needs. Thus the “introduction”, carefully explains the scope of the work, and the Alphabetical List of Authors, with some variant names and spellings (transliterations of the Arabic script), helps the student find an author who may have been seen in a source with non‐standardized transliteration. Equally useful are Authors by Nationality and Authors by Time Period in aiding a student of the literature to focus more precisely. The purpose of the two final listings, Frequently Cited Web Sites and Frequently Cited References is not immediately obvious, but they present the user with both a starting point for more general research than for an individual author and a sort of scope‐note for inclusion in the listing. Clearly this work is intended as a reference rather than a personal acquisition, and as a starting point rather than a complete bibliography for the advanced scholar, but given that its scope and intentions are clearly defined, it fulfills its purpose beautifully.
