“The Quarter” is perhaps what every scholar of a deceased author dreams of finding: something new and unseen in a landscape that had previously seemed finite, insurmountably bordered by birth and death. For Egyptian journalist Mohamed Shoair, that dream became reality in 2018, some 12 years after the death of his Nobel Prize-winning compatriot, Naguib Mahfouz. While researching a book about Mahfouz’s controversial novel “Children of the Alley,” Shoair learned ...