The Egyptian revolution is over, the army wields power and the new government is in disarray. Tensions between Christians and Muslims are ascendant and members of the elite are leaving the country in droves while those who remain bemoan the masses as ignorant ideologues. This is the Egypt of Waguih Ghali’s “Beer in the Snooker Club,” a coming-of-age novel set in 1952 that, much like “The Catcher in the Rye” in America, articulated the identity crisis of a generation. Ghali’s characters — young, precocious, cosmopolitan — are lost in the bewildering aftermath of the military coup that overthrew the pliant boy-king Farouk. They pine for the easeful gambling, womanizing and drinking of the past even as they scorn both the ancien régime’s sordid pretensions and the new regime’s inability to deliver on its vaulted promises; “We have the worst of both systems,” one of them declares, exasperated. Ghali, who published his novel in 1964 and committed suicide five years later in the bathtub of his British editor’s Primrose Hill apartment, took the fall of the monarchy as his subject. Still, his tale presents uncanny parallels to today’s Egypt, where artists, intellectuals and youth at large are beginning to fashion a new cultural republic of sorts even as they also struggle to find their bearings.

Under Mubarak, the Egyptian literary scene, long the center of the Arab cultural universe, floundered. While the state remained the primary patron of Egyptian literature, absorbing and co-opting anyone it possibly could, many authors escaped prickly Egyptian censors by publishing their books in more lenient Lebanon. Meanwhile, plush literary foundations and glittering prizes popped up in the much wealthier gulf countries. Still, there were pockets of activity. In the late 1990s, a former journalist named Mohamed Hashem founded Merit, a publisher credited with nurturing a new Egyptian avant-garde. Merit published Alaa al-Aswany, the dentist turned literary star whose “Yacoubian Building” captured the jaded grandeur of downtown Cairo. It also put out Ahmed Alaidy, whose stories of youthful mall culture used a vernacular Arabic — complete with text messages — that challenged the high orthodoxy of classical Arabic, and Khaled al-Berry, who skillfully narrated his experiences as a teenage jihadist in “Life Is More Beautiful Than Paradise.”

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