The writer of Archeology: 12 miniatures, he also authors essays and short stories. He is a classical stylist in the French and Arabic style: elegant, lucid and scholarly: In You Won’t Speak My Tongue (2002), he fluctuates between short stories and essays in order to present a travel book which, though it speaks of various places (Morocco, China) and times (from the Middle Ages to today), its underlying theme involves the chasms formed by translation. I Speak Every Language but in Arabic (2013) is a collection of articles, reading notes and conferences on the relationship of everyday Arabic and classical Arabic, and the Arabic language’s relationship with other languages. The title was inspired by Kafka and refers to how difficult it is to escape the web of language itself. Curiosity Forbidden: reading “The Thousand and One Nights” (2011) is a book for book lovers that deals with the topics of narration, truth, lies, reading and writing. In The Eye and the Needle, he once again dives deep into "The Thousand and One Nights", that “infinite, circular” book, as Borges called it, the peak of all classical Arabic literature. The Author and His Doubles (1985), a study on literary imitation, forgery and invention, was the first of his texts to be translated into English, in 2001.