Yesterday and Today

Larbi Layachi is the pseudonym chosen by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, an illiterate storyteller working as a house servant in Tangier, Morocco. He dictated his novels, the first to be composed in the Arabic dialect Moghrebi, to the American author and translator Paul Bowles. Charhadi's novels are at once straightforward and a rich, complex look into a culture rarely seen from his uniquely leveling perspective.