New Short Fiction from Sudan: ‘A Bunch of Losers’
By Alhassan Bakri Translated by Nassir al-Sayeid al-Nour We were all naughty and talkative as kids, except Idris: he was extremely quiet. He mastered an incredible range of abilities, including […]
Fiction
New Short Fiction by Salah H. Ahmed: ‘Chicken Stew’
“The truth is, we didn’t taste it, because the tray came back with nothing on it except the bones—even the sauce had vanished. Your father swore he took onlytwo bites while Sheikh al-Raddi finished the rest. May it give him stomach pain.”
Samira Azzam’s ‘On the Road’
There goes the bell. I’ve been waiting for so long! I quickly pull my hand from the tub of water where the empty bottles are piled up, ready to be washed and refilled with beer, then loaded up and taken to the city’s bars and nightclubs. There, they’re poured straight into mouths whose thirst will never be quenched. They soon come back to me, empty, waiting to be washed.
Newly Translated Fiction: Emile Habibi’s ‘At Last the Almond Blossomed’
“Is this why you came to visit now?”
New Fiction by Ameer Hamad: ‘All That’s Left to Him’
“There, an angel revealed itself, taking the shape of an image he’d seen in a storybook, when he was younger, back when his mother read him stories about angels.”
New Fiction: An Excerpt from Belal Fadl’s ‘Um Mimi’
Belal Fadl’s Um Mimi, on the longlist for the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, unfolds in Fadl’s characteristic ironic style, following a young man who is desperate to escape the orbit of his family and enter into the world of film.
New Fiction from Sudan: Ahmed Abu Hazim’s ‘Fragments of Obsessions & Suspicions ‘
His face was hidden by his bent head, with its enormous turban, as he busied himself with the food in front of him. His hand went up and down between his mouth and the dishes like an old crane.
From Suleiman Naguib’s 1923 ‘Memoirs of a Coachman’
“Memoirs of a Coachman [Mudhakkirat ʿArbagi] tells us the story of Egypt’s 1919 revolution from the margins.”
An Excerpt from Ahmed El Fakharany’s ‘The Quail King: An Alexandrian Odyssey’
“I was nineteen years old, working in Mu`allim Idris’s workshop, when I asked him about the age of the Universe.”