Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 will be featured in a cultural exchange with Egypt, reports The Guardian.

In association with the US State Department, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has announced details of a literary cultural exchange with Egypt as part of the NEA’s Big Read campaign to encourage reading among American citizens.

The Big Read Egypt/US will involve reciprocal promotions of three celebrated American writers in Egypt, and just the one Egyptian writer in the States. Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs will be America‘s reading book, while Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath will be the focus of reading groups and other events in Cairo and Alexandria. In America, parallel events will take place in New York, Miami, Huntsville, Alabama and Brookings, South Dakota. The events will take place in both countries between this September and June 2009.

What could be a more appropriate choice than a Bradbury novel that’s already in the Library of Alexandria?

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]