Fullblood Arabian [Paperback]

A prominent practitioner of the Arabic very short story (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), Osama Alomars poetic fictions embody the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assads police state.Marvellous compressions.In Alomar''s stories [...] fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgencyThe stories'' distinctive flavour comes from Alomar''s masterful shifts of character perspective within extremely tight parameters [&] The book is full of these moments which trip you up, swing bluntly from one psyche to another, rapidly decelerate time and play with scale, all of it exposing the delicate balance of our presumptions and allegiances; the small dictatorships that we foster second by second.[His stories] convey a raw combination of beauty and resignation, as if the two were created to reside under the same roof, hope and hurt at one [&] Alomar is a man of small but universally affecting insights.A New Directions Poetry Pamphlet by one of the most well-respected Arabic poets writing today, with an introduction by Lydia Davis