New Short Fiction: Saga Hamdan’s ‘Fragility’
A beautifully tender, skin-of-ice-on-water short fiction by Saga Hamdan, translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood.
Fiction
From Georgia Makhlouf’s ‘Bitter Country’
Georgia Makhlouf’s Pays Amer (Presses de la Cité, 2024) won the 2025 Prix Méditerranée des lecteurs, awarded by the “Des livres et nous” circle of the Perpignan Media Library, and is a finalist for the 2025 Prix de la Littérature Arabe. This excerpt comes from Chapter 18.
Summer Short Fiction: Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni’s ‘Mimi’
This short story is taken from Ibrahim Al-Mazni’s short-story collection Fi Al-Tareeq (On the Road), published in 1937. Most of the 20-odd stories in the collection are humorous or satirical.
Short Fiction in Translation: Mohamed Kheir’s ‘Duty Calls’
“Duty Calls” is from Mohamed Kheir’s 2014 short-story collection, Blink. As translator Caroline Benson writes, “Mohamed Kheir is at the forefront of a group of Egyptian writers known for astonishing readers with their ability to capture the poetics of quotidian contemporary life. The strength of Kheir’s writing lies in its creative and imaginative probings of the tensions, layers, and contradictions of gender, emigration, family, politics, and class.”
Short Fiction in Translation: Azher Jirjees’s ‘The Reed Horse’
The Arabic original of this short story appears in the 2017 edition of Azher Jirjees’s collection The Sweetmaker.
Short Summer Fiction: Ibrahim Al-Mazni’s ‘Eve and the Viper’
This short story is taken from Ibrahim Al-Mazni’s short-story collection Fi Al-Tareeq (On the Road), published in 1937. Most of the 20-odd stories in the collection are humorous or satirical.
On Hiva Nebi’s ‘One-size-fits-all Blue Dress’
“In her debut novel One-size-fits-all Blue Dress, Syrian-Kurdish writer Hiva Nebi offers us a rare gem: a book that doesn’t simply tell a story, but draws the readers into a raw, intimate exploration of the self. While the novel’s focus is postpartum depression, it also captures the experiences of being a woman, of giving birth, of living in a war zone, and of being married yet unbearably alone.”
New Short Fiction: ‘Sleeping in Front of Al-Gomhorya Cafe’
In this short fiction by Mai Al-Maghribi, “a watchtower grew over my shoulder, yellow and dry, with windows on both sides, and my father was the security guard who watched my every move.”
Classic Short Fiction: Mahmoud al-Badawi’s ‘The Peddler’
Critic Sabry Hafez writes, in the Journal of Arabic Literature, that, “Amongst the men of letters of his generation, Mahmud Al-Badawi (b. 1911) stands as a lone and unique literary figure. He spent his literary life away from the limelight of public fame despite his substantial contribution to the development of Egyptian literature.”