New Short Fiction from Kuwait: ‘The Phone Call’
In this short fiction from Kuwait, the central character and his author are in a standoff over a telephone call ...
Classic Short Fiction: Mohammed Hussein Heikal’s ‘The Second Family’
Short fiction by Mohammed Hussein Heikal (1888 - 1956) about marriage and money in early twentieth century Egypt ...
Classic Short Fiction: ‘On New Year’s Eve’
What happens on New Year's Eve when a conservative (and naive) father comes to his son's front door, in Cairo, and hears something he never expected? A holiday classic from Egyptian writer Ibrahim Abdelkader Al-Mazni (1889–1949) ...
‘A Plot in the Making’
New short fiction by the relentlessly creative Palestinian writer Nasser Rabah ...
Classic Short Fiction: al-Irani’s The Last Bullet
A classic short story by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani in which wealthy men in Amman tell a Palestinian waiter he should be happy ...
Short Fiction in Translation: ‘Child’s Tears’ by Yasmeen Hanoosh
"Even language began to fade. The family forgot the words for their old routines and couldn’t replace them with new ones fast enough." ...
Classic Short Fiction: Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani’s ‘My Secret Picture’
Palestinian short-story writer, publisher and translator Mahmoud Saif al-Din al-Irani (1914-1974) writes about love, loyalty, and gender expectations in the early twentieth century ...
From Zuhair Al Hiti’s ‘A Nest of Embers’
This is the story of Zafaran, a young man trying to escape the labels slapped on Sabeans, who leaves Baghdad hoping to find freedom in a small village. Yet, as soon as he arrives, he is recognized as the "Sabean," and his life takes a new turn, such that he not only faces the myths about Sabeans but the village's inner darkness ...
Najati Sidqi: ‘The Millionaire Communist’
This sharply satirical short story, published in Sidqi's 1962 short-story collection of the same name, is a satire that follows the story of a real-life fellow Arab Communist from Haifa who returned from Russia and got rich profiteering off a war-relief charity ...
Classic Short Fiction: ‘Deducted from Official Budgetary Sources’
A classic office farce from Al-Sahhar's collection "Being a Civil Servant," published in 1944 ...
