Arabic Belles Lettres brings together ten studies that shed light on important questions in the study of Arabic language, literature, literary history, and writerly culture.

The volume is divided into three sections. Early Narratives comprises: Joseph Lowry on the Qur'an’s allusive legal language; Abed el-Rahman Tayyara on matrilineal lineages in the context of Badr and Uhud; Ruqayya Khan on the ramifications of public courtship in ‘Udhri romances; and Philip Kennedy on firasah (reading for signs and traces) in medieval narrative. Medieval Authors comprises: Shawkat Toorawa on 'Ubaydallah ibn Ahmad ibn Abi Tahir’s History of Baghdad; Maurice Pomerantz and Bilal Orfali on Ibn Faris and the origins of the maqamah genre; Everett Rowson on al-Tawhidi and his predecessors (a reprint of his 1996 ZDMG article); and Ghayde Ghraowi on al-Khafaji and his Rayhanat al-alibba’. Modern Egypt comprises: Roger Allen on a cultural controversy in the Cairo newspapers of 1902; and Devin Stewart on preposterous boasting and ingenuity in on modern Egyptian Arabic.