Shahrazad's Tooth and Other Stories

by Gretchen McCullough

In the Empty Flat Upstairs, a Japanese woman, Keiko, has mastered Arabic but is driven crazy by her insistence on knowing the literal truth in a city which values hyperbole and exaggeration. In contrast, an Egyptian neighbor, Mona, becomes so obsessed with watching her foreign gay neighbor that she completely loses interest in her husband and her domestic responsibilities. Instead of watching soap operas, she hangs over the balcony, fascinated and shocked by what she sees. In the final story of the collection, Karalombos and Gary, two fugitives on the run, sneak back into Egypt on the 28th of January 2011, only to find Cairo turned upside down. They take care of the pets of those expatriates who have fled the country. To their surprise, they are even recruited to be actors in a reality television show about the Pyramids during the Egyptian Revolution.

163 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 27, 2013

Reviews

[Annemarie Neary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gretchen McCullough is an American academic who has lived and worked in Cairo for several years. Her stories are set mainly in the ex pat milieu, but if that conjures up gin slings and tennis then think again! The Cairo she writes about is full of bizarre, anarchic, extraordinary characters - a scissor-throwing Swedish belly-dancer, an man known as Ugly Duck with a colourful and very public love-life, an academic whose environmental protest spectacularly backfires, a pair of fugitives who sneak back into the country the day the Tahrir Square protests take hold. She writes cracking dialogue, and has a great line in dead-pan internal monologue. If you're considering visiting Cairo, let alone living there, read it! It's very funny stuff.