Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction

by Jordan Elgrably (Editor), Hanif Kureishi (Contribution by), Omar El Akkad (Contribution by), Salar Abdoh (Contribution by), Leila Aboulela (Contribution by)

Overview

One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books for Spring!

Featured in Alta Magazine's New Books for May!

Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life in the global Arab/Muslim world.

"Provocative and subtle, nuanced and surprising, these stories demonstrate how this complicated and rich region might best be approached—through the power of literature."—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed

Stories from the Center of the World gathers new writing from the greater Middle East (or SWANA), a vast region that stretches from Southwest Asia, through the Middle East and Turkey, and across Northern Africa. The 25 authors included here come from a wide range of cultures and countries, including Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, to name some.

In “Asha and Haaji,” Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders who become uprooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. In Nektaria Anastasiadou’s “The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,” two students in Istanbul from different classes — and religions that have often been at odds with one another — believe they can overcome all obstacles. MK Harb’s story, “Counter Strike,” is about queer love among Beiruti adolescents; and Salar Abdoh’s “The Long Walk of the Martyrs” invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. In “Eleazar,” Karim Kattan tells an unexpected Palestinian story in which the usual antagonists — Israeli occupation forces — are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. Omar El Akkad’s “The Icarist” is a coming-of-age story about the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away.

Contributors include: Salar Abdoh, Leila Aboulela, Farah Ahamed, Omar El Akkad, Sarah AlKahly-Mills, Nektaria Anastasiadou, Amany Kamal Eldin, Jordan Elgrably, Omar Foda, May Haddad, Danial Haghighi, Malu Halasa, MK Harb, Alireza Iranmehr, Karim Kattan, Hanif Kureishi, Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, Diary Marif, Tariq Mehmood, Sahar Mustafah, Mohammed Al-Naas, Ahmed Naji, Mai Al-Nakib, Abdellah Taia, and Natasha Tynes

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872869073
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	05/07/2024
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,095,023
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jordan Elgrably is a Franco-American and Moroccan writer, editor and translator, whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi, and The Paris Review. He is the editor of Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights, 2024) and co-editor with Malu Halasa of Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2024). He is the editor-in-chief of The Markaz Review, and is based in Montpellier, France and California.

Hanif Kureishi is the author of The Buddha of Suburbia, Intimacy, Love in a Blue Time, and the screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette, among many other works. He lives in London. 

Omar El Akkad is the author of the novels American War and What Strange Paradise. Born in Egypt, he spent his youth in the Gulf, then moved to Canada, and now lives in Oregon. 

Salar Abdoh is the author of the novels Poet Game, Opium, Tehran At Twilight, Out of Mesopotamia, and A Nearby Country Called Love, and is the editor and translator of the anthology Tehran Noir. He’s based in New York. 

Sudanese-born Leila Aboulela is the author of two short story collections and six novels, including The New York Times Editor’s Choice River Spirit. She’s based in Aberdeen, Scotland. 

Malu Halasa is a Jordanian-Filipina American author of the novel Mother of All Pigs, and the non-fiction anthologies, Woman Life Freedom, Voices and Art from the Women’s Protests in Iran, Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, with Maziar Bahari, and The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design, with Rana Salam. Halasa is the Literary Editor of The Markaz Review, and is based in London. 

Sahar Mustafah’s first novel The Beauty of Your Face was named a Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review, and included in Marie Claire Magazine’s Best Fiction by Women. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the Palestine Book Awards. She was awarded a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship from the New Literary Project and a literature grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Mustafah is a native Chicagoan and currently resides in Orland Park, IL.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

The center of the world, where recorded civilization got its start over 7,000 years ago, can be found in southwestern Asia, in ancient Mesopotamia. It can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Torah and the Talmud, in The Odyssey and The Iliad of Homer; in Zoroastrianism, which predated the Qu’ran by over 2,000 years; in A Thousand and One Nights and in the literature of everyone from Khalil Gibran to Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Ahdaf Souief, Nizar Qabbani, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmood Darwish, Forugh Farrokhzad, Amin Maalouf, Edward Said, Hisham Matar, Assia Dejar, Kateb Yacine and too many more to name.

Eventually nationalism took root, as it did in Europe, and the ancient civilizations became identified as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the many other countries, small and large, that stretch from the Mashriq to the Maghreb — from Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east to Morocco in the west.

But in 1902, American naval historian and retired admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan expressed a hegemonic vision of the world in a paper he published in the National Review. In “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” Mahan described the western Asian region from the Gulf to the Mediterranean as “the Middle East,” suggesting that whichever navy controlled that part of the world would hold the key to world domination. After World War I, Europeans jumped into the fray with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, divvied up the region, with several countries coming under British or French influence. The domino effect of outsiders meddling in the affairs of west Asian nations led to the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference, the partition of Palestine, the creation of Trans-Jordan (a British protectorate for 25 years), the division of Greater Syria into Syria and Lebanon, the end of Palestine and the establishment of Israel…right up to the year 1953, when the CIA with the machinations of MI6, succeeded in fomenting the overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, which 26 years later, would lead to the anti-Shah uprising that became known as the Iranian or Islamic Revolution.

All of this to say that “the Middle East” or the “Near East” are akin to exonyms, terms used by outsiders to define others as they often do not define themselves; they are convenient catch phrases that continue to cause consternation today among those of us who are from the center of the world. Lebanese poet and translator Huda Fakhreddine calls the “Middle East” a trap — “a made-up thing, a construct of history and treacherous geography, the Middle East as an American trope, a stage for identity politics.”

To be sure, neither Rear Admiral Mahan nor Lord Balfour, much less Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot, or any of the other many thousands of western politicians, secret agents, generals, businessmen and other meddlers have ever given much thought or exhibited empathy when it comes to what it means to be Iraqi or Syrian or Iranian or Egyptian, or Palestinian. Geopolitics has been capitalism’s overlord and nationalism’s emperor, serving agendas that have little to do with the needs of real people.

It is a given that governments prefer borders and passports, shored up by flags and patriotism, while people will always find a way to relate to one another, in spite of their nationalities. Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the mosaic or the salad when it comes to parsing my own identity, understanding that we are all the sum of multiple parts, and thus neither quite this nor that. Just as it takes several colors to create a mosaic, and a salad contains diverse ingredients, each of us is much more than our national identity card.

Judging from my DNA, I am 50% North African, Moroccan on my father’s side, but I carry two passports, French and American, and feel myself an honorary Palestinian, because with the freedom of Palestinians comes our own liberation. By all appearances, I am a privileged male who passes for white, yet I have always identified with women, underdogs and people of color. As a result, the center of the world has been my center these past many years, since before 9/11. In fact, I became closer to my North African roots as a result of living in Spain in the lead-up to the 1992 Quincentennial, when there was a lot of talk about the Spanish Muslims and Jews who were effectively exiled from Spain as a result of the Inquisition in 1492. They left a powerful imprint on the soul of the country, as Marie Rosa Menocal so elegantly describes in her classic work, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002). But the convivencia that Menocal described was not merely a period of Spanish history; to me as a multifaceted American and citizen of the world, this coexistence, this cultural entente was innate to southwest Asian societies. In the aftermath of the Nakba, the Islamic Revolution and the Iraq War, however, the region has lost much of its organic diversity, and now economic strife and climate devastation continue what western meddlers started over a hundred years ago.

Not all is doom and gloom when it comes to the center of the world today, however, because despite the failures of the Green Movement, the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, “What has not changed is West Asia’s geopolitical centrality,” as Chas Freeman has written. “It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe and the routes that connect them meet. The region’s cultures cast a deep shadow across northern Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean. It is the epicenter of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three ‘Abrahamic religions’ that together shape the faiths and moral standards of over three-fifths of humankind. This gives the region global reach.”

This is the time for the original voices of people from the region to be heard — for Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Middle Eastern Jews, Armenians, Turks, Afghans, Pakistanis, the Amazigh and Kabyl peoples, Druze, Assyrians, Copts, Yezidis et alia to speak up, and speak out.

•

Stories From the Center of the World is a collection of 25 fictions, divided into three sections, loosely themed around immigration, love and family, and death and immortality. Many of the writers live outside the countries where they were born and often write about. As a result, I think of them as exquisite insider-outsiders — the natural condition of all writers, I would argue, is to be both within and from the world of which we write, and yet hovering at its edge, almost as if we don’t quite belong.

Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders in “Asha and Haaji” who become unrooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. Asha, who describes himself as a harmless bookworm with no religion, notes that “no terrorist ever found inspiration in Kafka,” and seduces the younger, whiter Haaji with his erudition. He reminds us that “the foreigner has been suspect from the beginning of time,” and we are not surprised when Asha realizes that in polite London society, he is a pariah, an outcast.

In “The Salamander,” the young Lebanese American writer Sarah AlKahly-Mills champions women and girls, who want to escape abusive men and poverty. The salamander becomes a metaphor for regeneration, and as a result, hope for a better tomorrow. In “The Suffering Mother of the Whole World” by Amany Kamal Eldin, Nadia El Sha’er returns to Cairo to visit her retired father and weary grandmother, but knows that she feels far more at home in her American life. Unmarried, she exults in her freedom and exhibits no desire to move back to Cairo. For Nadia, having become an American, being Egyptian now is a matter of nostalgia.

In Ahmed Naji’s “Godshow.com,” another Egyptian exile searches for a place in Las Vegas to pray, but one feels that the exercise will be in vain, that the search is just for show, for appearances. “All I had wanted was to visit a mosque, not send my children to an Islamic brainwashing laundromat.” In muscular prose, translated from Arabic by Rana Asfour, Naji winks at the reader, inviting us to experience life in his skin, albeit with just the right dose of irony. We are at once inside the character’s experience, and outside with the writer, enjoying his sharp-eyed observations.

In “Nadira of Tlemcen,” things take a more serious turn with Abdellah Taïa’s story about a young Algerian named Samir, whose father always understood that his son was different from other children, but it isn’t until Samir can escape to Paris that he will begin to become his true self. In “The Afghan and the Persian,” a literature professor from Kabul has no choice but to become a harraga, and finds himself in France following a shipwreck. “Why have I come here? I washed up on your shores as a man who loves books and words and libraries and ideas. I thought by coming here, I could save myself.”

Often the men, women and children in these stories have no choice but to flee their troubled countries, but in Malu Halasa’s “A Dog in the Woods,” an Arab patriarch remembers how he became an educator in Ohio, and raised his children to be more American than Arab; he had little desire to look back, and successfully assimilated, but his children do not seem quite so assured in their identity.

With the second part of the book, “The Question of Love,” writers recount divergent tales of love and loss, strained family relations, and dashed dreams. Farah Ahamed’s innovative love story, “Anarkali, or Six Early Deaths in Lahore,” upends expectations as it recounts events from the end to the beginning, and the poor street sweeper known as Anarkali (not her real name) is a surprisingly articulate narrator. In Alireza Iranmehr’s “Buenos Aires of Her Eyes,” translated by novelist Salar Abdoh, a love story between an octogenarian and a much younger woman strikes us as both inevitably tragic and absurd, but also touching and inspirational. The old man — an Iranian transplanted to Switzerland, who is said to have been in love only twice in his life — instructs his children that, “Each person lives in their own special universe. A place no one else can know and yet is not impossible to imagine.” Iranmehr’s story, like the others in this anthology, invites the reader into the special universes of a diverse cast of characters who are each fallible, vulnerable, and yet incredibly strong at the same time, fortified by the experience of having started life over in a new country, often in a new language, braving rejection, and sometimes persecution, as they slowly adjust to their new lives.

We find reliable narrators in the stories by Nektaria Anastasiadou, MK Harb, Leila Aboulela, Danial Haghighi and Natasha Tynes, which all take place among people who have not had to leave their country, yet confront situations in which love itself is a questionable unguent or adhesive. Love may not be enough, it might not solve all problems, but clearly we are better off living with it, as ugly as things can get.

In Anastasiadou’s “The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,” two students in Istanbul issued from different classes — and religions that have often been at odds with one another — believe they can overcome all obstacles. In Harb’s story, “Counter Strike,” we’re invited to empathize with queer love among Beiruti adolescents, yet we may find ourselves scoffing internally at Al-Naas’ heteronormative character in “The Cactus.” Aboulela’s “Raise Your Head High” features a sympathetic narrator, who loves her sister Dunia (married to a creep) but is hounded by her Tante Walaa. She ultimately seems like a very lonely soul, right up to the moment that the Egyptian uprising erupts, on January 25, 2011. In Haghighi’s “Here, Freedom,” an arranged marriage turns out not to be quite what it seems, right when Iran is going through another series of protests. And in “The Agency,” Natasha Tynes invites us to experience traditional Amman, as men and women look for their ideal mate via a dating agency that has developed its own peculiar classification for what passes for a virtuous woman (the men are under no such scrutiny).

Finally, in the last section, “The Roots of Heaven,” Salar Abdoh invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. There is glory in being a martyr, but not everyone makes the cut. In Mai Al-Nakib’s “The Burden of Inheritance,” a departed husband’s death turns out to be the beginning of a calvary, as his wife discovers that art can become a wearisome housemate. Do we best remember our loved ones via their words, or the work they leave behind?

Karim Kattan, a native of Bethlehem who writes in both French and English, tells an unexpected Palestinian story, almost haunting in its detail, in which the usual boogeymen — Israeli occupation forces — are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. The brother in “Eleazar” is both an innocent and a potential suspect, and his sister Mariam, who narrates, seems out of her depth.

The young Lebanese American writer, May Haddad, takes readers on an outer space journey in their speculative fiction, “Ride on, Shooting Star,” in which Carna’ is an unconventional heroine to say the least. Here, the future seems inconsequential, while the present looms as large as the known universe. There are, of course, no pat answers, but we are somehow with this young cosmic courier all the way, dreaming with Carna’ that she will find her utopia. In Tariq Mahmood’s “The Settlement,” the oldest and tallest tree in the world is at the center of a controversy in which a jailed mystery woman resists interrogation. And in Sahar Mustafah’s “The Peacock,” a Palestinian woman who has become an internal migrant to escape her futureless existence, finds her power unleashed when she decides to risk everything.

Omar El Akkad’s “The Icarist” is a coming-of-age story, yes, but it’s much more than that. It is about the encounter that inevitably occurs between the haves and the have-nots, the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away. A quintessential outsider, El Akkad’s thirteen-year-old Mo’min Abdelwahad is dimly aware that his future in Dubai is limited, yet he remains unilluminated for decades, until the moment he risks death.

We come to the end of our adventures with Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi’s story about a mediocre writer who imagines that he might just be able to escape his destiny, challenge what is maktub, if only he can make a deal with the devil. In “The Devil’s Waiting List,” Mansi takes the initiative, but begins to feel that he is a fool — not unlike the way one feels buying a lottery ticket.

Taken together, these 25 stories represent a collective orchestra of voices and are the beginning of an east-west conversation.

—Jordan Elgrably

Montpellier, September 2023

Table of Contents

Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction

Jordan Elgrably, Editor

Annotated Table of Contents

Introduction

I

Exiles, Émigrés, Refugees

Asha and Haaji — Hanif Kureishi

The author of the story collection Love in a Blue Time and the novels Intimacy and The Last Word weaves a dystopian tale of migrants, love and literature.

Hanif Kureishi is the author of The Buddha of Suburbia, Intimacy, Love in a Blue Time, and the screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette, among many other works. He lives in London.

The Salamander — Sarah AlKahly-Mills

In this magical tale set in Lebanon and on a mysterious Mediterranean island, people dream of escape while a biologist seeks an elusive salamander. Sarah AlKahly-Mills is a Lebanese American writer living in Rome, Italy who was born in Burbank, California.

The Suffering Mother of the Whole World — Amany Kamal Eldin

A wayward daughter leaves Boston to spend a summer back home in Cairo, where she observes the decline of her once prominent family.

Amany Kamal Eldin was born in Egypt and received her MA from Columbia University. She has lived in the United States, England, France, Austria, Kenya, Italy, Oman, Yemen, and for the last 20 years, in the United Arab Emirates.

Godshow.com — Ahmed Naji

In a translation from Rana Asfour, a Muslim family man and an exile from Egypt searches for the right mosque in which to pray in Las Vegas.

Ahmed Naji is the author of four novels in Arabic: Rogers (2007), Using Life (2014), And Tigers to my Room (2020) and Happy Endings (2023). Using Life landed him a sentence in one of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s prisons for offending public morality, an experience he writes about in his memoir Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison (McSweeney’s, 2023). His work has been translated into a number of languages and he has won several prizes including a Dubai Press Club Award, a PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, and an Open Eye Award. He lives in exile in Las Vegas.

Nadira of Tlemcen — Abdellah Taïa

Sometimes you have to escape everything you know in order to become yourself.

Abdellah Taïa writes in French and has published nine novels (many translated into English and other languages), including L’armée du salut (2006), Une mélancolie arabe (2008), Infidèles (2012), Un pays pour mourir (2015), Celui qui est digne d’être aimé (2017), La vie lente (2019) and Vivre à ta lumière (2022). His novel Le jour du Roi was awarded the French Prix de Flore in 2010. His novel, A Country for Dying, translated into English by Seven Stories Press, won the Pen America Literary Awards 2021.

My Rebellious Feet — Diary Marif

A Kurdish boy in a large family longs for a proper pair of shoes that he can show off to his cousins and schoolmates.

Diary Marif is a Canadian Kurdish nonfiction writer and freelance journalist. He moved to Vancouver from Iraq in 2017, where he has been focusing on nonfiction writing and has recently written two book chapters for two different projects. He earned a master's degree in History from Pune Universityin India in 2013.

The Afghan and the Persian — Jordan Elgrably

Forced to flee his homeland, the new life of a refugee is Europe is upended by an unforeseen conflict.

Jordan Elgrably is a Franco-American and Moroccan writer and translator whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi and The Paris Review. Editor-in-chief and founder of The Markaz Review, he is the cofounder and former director of the Levantine Cultural Center/The Markaz in Los Angeles (2001-2020), and producer of the stand-up comedy show “The Sultans of Satire” (2005-2017) and hundreds of other public programs. He is based in Montpellier, France, and California.

A Dog in the Woods — Malu Halasa

A loss heals broken families and identities fragmented by assimilation.

Malu Halasa is a Jordanian-Filipina American author of the novel Mother of All Pigs, and the non-fiction anthologies, Woman Life Freedom, Voices and Art from the Women’s Protests in Iran, Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, with Maziar Bahari, and The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design, with Rana Salam. Halasa is the Literary Editor of The Markaz Review and is based in London.

II

The Question of Love

Anarkali, or Six Early Deaths in Lahore — Farah Ahamed

In the ancient romantic tale, Anarkali was a courtesan dancer in the Mughal court of Salim Jahangir who was burnt alive for falling in love with him. Here, she is a poor street sweeper in Lahore, nicknamed Anarkali by a white professor researching bombings of the city’s churches.

Farah Ahamed’s writing has been published in The White Review, Ploughshares and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others. She is the editor of Period Matters: Menstruation Experiences in South Asia, Pan Macmillan India, 2022. She was born and raised in Kenya and now lives in London.

Buenos Aires of Her Eyes — Alireza Iranmehr

In this translation by Salar Abdoh, one of Iran’s best-known contemporary storytellers conjures a tale of octogenarian love in a Nabokovian mode.

Alireza Iranmehr was born in Mashhad, Iran. He has written extensively as a critic and scriptwriter, and his novels and short story collections have won several of Iran’s major literary awards. His works include The Pink Cloud (Candle and Fog, 2013), and All the Men of Tehran Are Named Alireza, and Summer Snow, both collections published in Persian. He lives and works in the Gilan province near the Caspian Sea.

The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff — Nektar Anastasiadou

A rich tale of thwarted love between Sephardic and Rum residents of Istanbul.

Nektaria Anastasiadou is the author of the novels A Recipe for Daphne (Hoopoe/AUC Press, 2021) and Beneath the Feet of Eternal Spring (Papadopoulos, 2023). She is a Turkish citizen writing in Istanbul Greek and English.

Rana Asfour (translator), a native of Amman, Jordan, is a writer, book critic and translator whose work has appeared in such publications as Madame Magazine, The Guardian UK and The National/UAE. She is the Managing Editor of The Markaz Review.

The Cactus — Mohammed Al-Naas

In a translation by Rana Asfour, can a man who loves a woman prove his mettle by taking proper care of a cactus that stings him with its spines?

Mohammed Al-Naas is a Libyan writer who is interested in alternative Libyan stories. His novel Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table (HarperVIA, 2024) won the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He divides his time between Libya and Turkey.

Counter Strike — MK Harb

In this queer coming-of-age story, the narrator remembers a tenuous sense of home as he searched for himself in adolescence in Lebanon.

MK Harb is a writer from Beirut who serves as Editor-at-Large for Lebanon at Asymptote Journal. His writings have been published in The White Review, The Bombay Review, BOMB, The Times Literary Supplement, Hyperallergic, Art Review Asia, Asymptote, Scroope Journal and Jadaliyya. He is currently working on a collection of short stories pertaining to the Arabian Peninsula. He lives in Dubai.

Raise Your Head High — Leila Aboulela

Can Egypt’s Arab Spring heal a rift between a sister who has been abused and a sister who doesn’t believe her?

Sudanese-born Leila Aboulela is the author of two short story collections and six novels, including The New York Times Editor’s Choice River Spirit. She’s based in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Here, Freedom — Danial Haghighi

In this translation from Salar Abdoh, a small town couple in Iran have a brutally honest conversation about marriage in light of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests.

Danial Haghighi is a Tehran-based author of seven books and numerous essays in Persian. His work has appeared in the short story collection Tehran Noir (Akashic Books, 2014).

The Agency — Natasha Tynes

A thirty-something Jordanian woman with an American MBA hits her stride, running Amman’s first international dating agency, but still hasn’t found her one true love.

Nastasha Tynes is a Jordanian-American author in Rockville, Maryland, and a regular contributor to The Washington Post, Nature Magazine, Elle and Esquire, among others. Her short stories have appeared in Geometry, The Timberline Review, and Fjords. Her short story “Ustaz Ali” was a prizewinner at the prestigious annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival. She is also the author of the speculative literary novel They Called Me Wyatt.

III

The Roots of Heaven

The Long Walk of the Martyrs — Salar Abdoh

A story of Iranian and Afghan soldiers who survived the war against ISIS living in Tehran.

Salar Abdoh is the author of the novels Poet Game, Opium, Tehran At Twilight, Out of Mesopotamia, and A Nearby Country Called Love, and is the editor and translator of the anthology Tehran Noir. He’s based in New York.

The Burden of Inheritance — Mai Al-Nakib

A woman makes a Herculean effort to preserve the memory and artwork of her late husband.

Mai Al-Nakib is author of the novel An Unlasting Home (Mariner Books-HarperCollins, 2022) and the award-winning short story collection The Hidden Light of Objects (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2014). She was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in London, Edinburgh and St. Louis, Missouri. She divides her time between Kuwait and Greece.

Eleazar — Karim Kattan

A Palestinian family mysteriously disintegrates while violence permeates the valley in which they reside.

Karim Kattan is a Palestinian writer from Bethlehem who writes in French and English. He is the author, most recently, of the novel Le Palais des deux collines (‎Elyzad, 2021). Kattan, awarded the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie in 2021, has also been shortlisted for many other awards. His second novel, L'Éden à l'aube, is forthcoming in 2024.

Ride On, Shooting Star — May Haddad

In this sci-fi story, Carna’ is a spacefaring mail carrier fed up with working for the Universal Courier Service who journeys to the edge of the universe.

NOTE: Carna’ is an Arabic name — the apostrophe is meant to simulate a letter written in Arabic.

May Haddad is an Arab American writer of speculative fiction whose work deals with the Levantine Arab experience across time and space and touches on themes of nostalgia, isolation, memory, and longing. With roots tracing all over Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, they currently alternate their time between the U.S. and Lebanon. You can find their work in the SFWA Blog, The Markaz Review, and Nightmare Magazine.

Turkish Delights — Omar Foda

Omar Foda draws on family lore and fieldwork to weave together a satirical tale of ego and power in 1920s Egypt.

Omar Foda is a graduate of the PhD program in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published articles and a book on the history of Egypt including Egypt’s Beer: Stella, Identity and the Modern State (University of Texas, 2019) and has taught at Towson University, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Pennsylvania. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and lives in Syracuse, NY.

The Settlement — Tariq Mehmood

An allegorical story with the strange beauty and simplicity of a tale by Ghassan Kanafani or J.M. Coetzee.

Tariq Mehmood is a novelist and filmmaker. His first novel Hand On The Sun (Penguin, 1983) on racism and resistance in the UK was republished by Daraja Press in 2023. His next novel, Sing To The Western Wind, The Song It Understands, is due out in Spring 2024 from Verso. He works at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.

The Peacock — Sahar Mustafah

A Palestinian woman battles both the patriarchy and the occupation to free herself from the toxic jurisdiction men have claimed over her.

Sahar Mustafah’s first novel The Beauty of Your Face was named a Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review, and included in Marie Claire Magazine’s Best Fiction by Women. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the Palestine Book Awards. She was awarded a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship from the New Literary Project and a literature grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Mustafah is a native Chicagoan and currently resides in Orland Park, IL.

The Icarist — Omar El Akkad

A beguiling coming-of-age story set in Doha, where the writer grew up before his family emigrated to Canada.

Omar El Akkad is the author of the novels American War (Knopf, 2017) and What Strange Paradise (Knopf, 2021). Born in Egypt, he spent his youth in the Gulf, then moved to Canada, and now lives in Oregon.

The Devil’s Waiting List — Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi

A solitary bachelor, seeking success as a writer, wonders what he has to do in contemporary Cairo to get ahead.

Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi is an Egyptian author, translator and literary critic in Cairo who specializes in fantasy, science fiction and children’s literature. He has five novels published in Arabic so far. Two of them — Reem: Into the Unknown and Malaz: City of Resurrection — have been translated into English. He has published many short stories, poems, and articles published in various languages.

About the Writers and Translators

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2024

Elgrably, editor in chief of the Markaz Review, presents a welcome if uneven anthology of new Middle Eastern short fiction. Among the 25 writers included are familiar names like Leila Aboulela and Hanif Kureishi and newcomers including May Haddad and Diary Marif. Plenty of entries dazzle: among them, Abdellah Taïa’s gorgeous and formally inventive “Nadira of Tlemcen,” translated from the Arabic by Elgrably, about a trans Algerian woman who reminisces on her decades turning tricks in Paris; and Mohammed Al Naas’s moving “The Cactus,” translated from the Arabic by Rana Asfour, in which a young Libyan man’s potted cactus becomes a totem for his memories and desires for the lover he left behind in Tripoli. In contrast, “Counter Strike” by MK Harb feels clumsy and prosaic in its portrayal of queer desire among teens in Beirut who spend their time playing video games in an internet café. Other entries are a bit overwrought, like Marif’s “My Rebellious Feet,” in which the narrator, a young boy, has an epiphany about human suffering as a result of losing one of his shoes. On the whole, however, the anthology fulfills Elgrably’s stated vision of creating “a collective orchestra of voices and... the beginning of an east-west conversation.” The highlights alone are worth the price of admission. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A lively and diverse set of tales from a complex region."—Kirkus Reviews

"A deeply satisfying collection showcasing an array of brilliant writers who deserve to be better known. . . . Whether personifying the chaos of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as actual madness or poking fun at the remnants of British colonialism in Egypt, many of the stories confound common stereotypes about the region."—Booklist, Starred Review

"A truly ambitious mix of established and emerging literary stars from a region of the world too often viewed through the lens of religion and politics. The stories collected by Elgrably reflect almost every corner of the mosaic that is the modern Middle East, giving practically everyone a voice and serving as a reminder of our common humanity. A timely and necessary collection for anyone who loves good stories." —Reza Aslan, author of An American Martyr in Persia

"Many in America hold onto broad, centuries-old misunderstandings of Arab and Muslim life and politics that continue to harm, through both policy and rhetoric, a perpetually embattled and endangered region. With luck, these 25 tales by writers of Middle Eastern and North African origin might open hearts and minds alike."—The Millions

"From students in Istanbul grappling with one another's differing faiths to former ISIS-fighting combatants coping with PTSD, the narratives here illuminate the heartbreak, rage, and hopes of people from a vastly misread region of the world."—Alta Magazine

"Iconoclastic, intimate and powerful, this ample collection gathers unforgettable short stories from just-emerging diasporic writers as well as the region’s stars, covering a wide range of experiences from Edward Said's 'exiles, emigrés and refugees.' A balm for our time, when much of what the world hears about the Middle East has to do with numbers and political ideologies. In this collection, we hear intelligent, distinctive voices, expressing joy, humor, pain and irony in stories about love, exodus, renewal and assimilation." —Mona Simpson, author of Commitment

" . . . the anthology fulfills Elgrably's stated vision of creating 'a collective orchestra of voices and . . . the beginning of an east-west conversation.' The highlights alone are worth the price of admission."—Publishers Weekly

"This volume is loaded with two dozen stories of exile, love, and magical realism. The characters that populate them are a patchwork of ethnic identities, as it is the case in the 'center of the world'. What is impressive about this collection is how culturally informed and varied it is. . . . I highly recommend that readers of this rich anthology take time to rinse their palate between each story."—Zein El-Amine, author of Is This How You Eat a Watermelon?

From the Publisher