The Salmiya Collection: Stories of the Life and Times of Modern Kuwait

by Craig Loomis

In The Salmiya Collection, Loomis celebrates the essence of everyday life in a little-known part of the world. With lucid prose and keen detail, these stories offer nuanced portraits—tragicomic, bittersweet, and candid—of ordinary Kuwaitis: expatriates and natives, students and professors, siblings and lovers. In "Ancient Civilization 101," a young man suspects his girlfriend Mariam is unfaithful and, in a fury, shears her long hair when the confidence and boldness that first attracted him to her becomes a threat. In "The Conference on Rights and Freedom," two young students invited to present their paper at an academic conference in the United States share with their professor their dramatic plan to "show them who we are."

Each of the forty-six stories in the collection resonates with the others, illuminating a world that will linger with the reader long after the last sentence. Loomis renders a Kuwaiti society that is complex and distinct, while his characters and situations unveil a time and a place that is universal.

212 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2013

About the author

Craig Loomis is associate professor of English and head of the Division of Humanities and Arts at the American University of Kuwait. He is the author of A Softer Violence: Tales of Orient, and his short fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, Louisville Review, and Prague Revue.

Reviews

[Hashim Alsughayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had my concerns before reading this book,

An American writer writing about my home land, Kuwait and telling stories about the people of my country? Will he manage to paint the truth or write just another Oriental book that will make us look bad. I know Professor Loomis personally, as I was his student in one of his literature classes, knowing his personal opinions helped reading his book. Loomis simply did a great job here.

After reading The Salmiya Collection, I can truly say that I not only approve of Loomis' picture of Kuwait, but I actually like it.

Painting this realistic view of Kuwait is all I wanted Loomis to do, and he delivered. A wonderful book and an amazing collection of stories that every Kuwait will both understand and kinda enjoy. Loomis did a great job balancing the good and the bad of the society that he observed and wrote about. This element of the book is what made me love the book and the stories in it, giving reader both sides of the Kuwaiti society and not siding with either one of these sides.

A wonderful read indeed, highly recommended.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at Kuwaiti life from a long-time, expat resident. The stories of Kuwaiti students, expat residents, and daily life here ring incredibly true to me. I liked the occasional hint of humor. Overall the stories were serious in tone. I won't say it was fun to read, but it was well-written.

[Kathleen McKim · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could eloquently express my observations about life in Kuwait, I might have been able to write this book. So much of what Loomis manages to capture in this series of short vignettes is the strange meta-fiction of expat living. He's especially adept at giving a voice to the third world expats working grunge jobs for humiliating wages, endowing them with both humor and humanity. Though somewhat stereotypical, his treatment of the local Arab population, its obsession with prestige, power and pretty things, is dead on for this Western reader. He also pays tribute to local lore and legends, a camel steps on a landmine left over from the war, a barren woman waits to jump over the hull of a boat that is being built, and, of course, there are jinn. From now on, if anyone asks me what Kuwait is like, I'm just going to give them a copy of THE SALMIYA COLLECTION.