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Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction
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. For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, the region known as the Greater Middle East has faced colonization, war and occupation, while its people have been misrepresented and its literature relegated to oblivion by a Eurocentric culture industry. Emigrant communities are also frequently misunderstood, even as they attempt to adapt and melt into the fabric of new countries and languages. Now, in this potent anthology with more than its share of surprises, over two dozen writers with roots in the region, men and women, both native and in diaspora, insiders and outsiders, assert their narrative power. Moving from the margins to the markaz , or “center” — a word and a concept shared among languages of the region, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Urdu — they occupy and create a collective worldview. Selected from among a wave of new fiction published in The Markaz Review between 2020 and 2023, this “best of” collection features authors with roots in Egypt, Greece, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Pakistan and Sudan, to name just some places. In “Raise Your Head High,” Khartoum-born novelist Leila Aboulela writes of a rift between sisters that may only be healed by their solidarity during the Arab Spring.; in “Counter Strike,” MK Harb tells a queer coming-of-age story set in Lebanon; in “Eleazar,” Karim Kattan crafts a tale about a Palestinian family that mysteriously disintegrates. These stories, and these authors, will be new to many readers, now collected and published in English for the first time. Contributors include : Salar Abdoh, Leila Aboulela, Farah Ahamed, Omar El Akkad, Sarah AlKahly-Mills, Nektaria Anastasiadou, Amany Kamal Eldin, Jordan Elgrably, May Haddad, Malu Halasa, Mohamad Khalil (MK) Harb, Alireza Iranmehr, Karim Kattan, Hanif Kureshi, Sahar Mustafah, Ahmed Naji, Mai Al-Nakib and Natasha Tynes.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
352 pages, Paperback
Published May 7, 2024
22 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
About the author
Hanif Kureishi
129 books1,130 followersHanif Kureishi is the author of novels (including The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and Intimacy), story collections (Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body), plays (including Outskirts, Borderline and Sleep With Me), and screenplays (including My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic and Venus). Among his other publications are the collection of essays Dreaming and Scheming, The Word and the Bomb and the memoir My Ear at His Heart.
Kureishi was born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies. After meeting and marrying Kureishi’s mother Audrey, Rafiushan settled in Bromley, where Kureishi was born, and worked at the Pakistan Embassy.
Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School where David Bowie had also been a pupil and after taking his A levels at a local sixth form college, he spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. Later he attended King’s College London and took a degree in philosophy. In 1985 he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980’s London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. It won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.
His book The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie. The next year, 1991, saw the release of the feature film entitled London Kills Me; a film written and directed Kureishi.
His novel Intimacy (1998) revolved around the story of a man leaving his wife and two young sons after feeling physically and emotionally rejected by his wife. This created certain controversy as Kureishi himself had recently left his wife and two young sons. It is assumed to be at least semi-autobiographical. In 2000/2001 the novel was loosely adapted to a movie Intimacy by Patrice Chéreau, which won two Bears at the Berlin Film Festival: a Golden Bear for Best Film, and a Silver Bear for Best Actress (Kerry Fox). It was controversial for its unreserved sex scenes. The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi in 2005.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.
Kureishi is married and has a pair of twins and a younger son.
Kureishi was born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies. After meeting and marrying Kureishi’s mother Audrey, Rafiushan settled in Bromley, where Kureishi was born, and worked at the Pakistan Embassy.
Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School where David Bowie had also been a pupil and after taking his A levels at a local sixth form college, he spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. Later he attended King’s College London and took a degree in philosophy. In 1985 he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980’s London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. It won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.
His book The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie. The next year, 1991, saw the release of the feature film entitled London Kills Me; a film written and directed Kureishi.
His novel Intimacy (1998) revolved around the story of a man leaving his wife and two young sons after feeling physically and emotionally rejected by his wife. This created certain controversy as Kureishi himself had recently left his wife and two young sons. It is assumed to be at least semi-autobiographical. In 2000/2001 the novel was loosely adapted to a movie Intimacy by Patrice Chéreau, which won two Bears at the Berlin Film Festival: a Golden Bear for Best Film, and a Silver Bear for Best Actress (Kerry Fox). It was controversial for its unreserved sex scenes. The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi in 2005.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.
Kureishi is married and has a pair of twins and a younger son.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 1, 2024
A beautiful and diverse collective that adds weight to any library.
February 27, 2025
Palestinians, Arabs and US
a review of Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction
Most of us are aware that the Palestinian people of Gaza are being treated like cattle in an abattoir at the hands of Israeli usurpers, who have called themselves “settlers” over the past eight decades. Those “settlers,” who revel in considering themselves victims while acting like mega-murderers, have used a surprise attack on Israelis by Palestinian opposition forces to justify a full-blown, ground-and-air-based genocide in their open-air concentration camp of Gaza, which contained more than two million Palestinians.
That indiscriminate genocide has been going on for 16 months, since October 7, 2023. Its victims are defenseless civilians, mainly women, children and the elderly. Such heinous persecution is aggravated by unlimited support of the Israeli aggressors by the United States, who supply an unending stream of arms, ordnance, intelligence and financing for the ongoing horror show. The Israelis cast this disproportionate campaign of mass murder as retribution for a Hamas surprise attack on the Israelis resulting in some 1,200 dead and 251 hostages. As of today, Feb. 21, 2025, Gaza's Government Media Office has updated Israel’s genocide death toll to at least 61,709 people, saying thousands of Palestinians missing under the rubble are now presumed dead. The UN estimates that the war has littered Gaza with at least 50 million tons of rubble — roughly 12 times the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. With more than 100 trucks working full time, it would take more than 15 years to clear the rubble. (Aljazeera)
We sympathize with those besieged Palestinians, but we don’t know them very well. Presumably they put their trousers on one leg at a time like the rest of us, but beyond that, we’re pretty much in the dark. Wouldn’t it be a luxury to be able to be better acquainted with them, their brothers and sisters, and their world? But how do we go about it? They’re over there; we’re over here. How do we establish contact. It’s not easy, but it’s now possible in small measure, thanks to a concerned editor with a genial idea, Jordan Elgrably, a native Californian of French and Moroccan heritage, currently resident in France, from where, with a multinational staff, he heads The Markaz Review (TMR), an online/offline project offering “Literature and Arts from the Center of the World.”
Elgrably put together a collection of short fiction from the Middle East and got it published by City Lights in San Francisco. That elegant gesture has shed light on the worlds of Middle Easterners today for all of us. Now we can all peer into their lives through their writing. The book is called Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction. What a cordial way to get to know the Palestinians and other Arabs, as well as Iranians, Afghans, Kurds, and immigrant communities who live in exile, in far-flung cities like London, Paris and Berlin.
The book sets the scene for us, opening with a double-page map of the Muslim world, out of which leap two overweening realizations:
1. Just what a huge area the Muslim world occupies, extending from Afghanistan and Pakistan on the east to the Moroccan Sahara on the west, a distance of almost 7,000 kilometers; and Sudan on the south and Turkey on the northeast, with almost half of the total area of the Muslim world in North Africa.
2. Just how miniscule is the area occupied by its perennial hotspot, the micro-mini states of Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. What keeps it “hot” are Israel’s ambitious territorial pretensions, backed up by the far-flung network of co-religionaries, in particular those of the United States, skillfully coordinated by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This pro-Israel lobbying group is influential beyond belief in American public life, with the power to bribe enough members of the United States Congress to do their bidding. This bribery of the world’s ostensibly most august legislative body may sound like science fiction, but it is not. It is the result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections. In the wake of that decision, the country—and the world—discovered just how venal American politicians are. When the Israeli prime minister—and notorious longtime mass murderer—Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Washington he is received with multiple standing ovations in joint sessions of the United States Congress. Nor is that enthusiasm tempered by the Israelis launching of a genocidal war against mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians, in Gaza and the West Bank.
With this rich backdrop in mind, let’s look at a noble effort to communicate some of today’s realities in the Muslim world, as seen by 25 of its writers of fiction who open for us 25 windows on their realities. The first thing the discerning reader notes is how much we have in common with the Palestinians. It seems we’re all in this together. We all have grandmothers and they’re all concerned about us and our future. We all have hopes and fears, projects and possibilities. We, the “us” of the West—which used to look privileged, but is beginning to look squalid—have more artificial intelligence, with all the irony that implies. Though many of the writers who have written these stories do not live in the Middle East. They have packed their memories and left. This we know thanks to the thoughtful editor who provides us with brief biographies of his authors. The first five on his list reside, respectively, in New York, Aberdeen, London, Oregon and Rome.
It's not unreasonable to guess that their stories are based on memories of former times. What prompted them to leave their homelands? That question is broached in more than one of the stories, including “Asha and Jaaji” by Hanif Kureishi, which is about two refugees, struggling together in London as cleaners who are social outcasts. What is noteworthy in many of them is their universality. Whether the author is writing from Egypt or Iran, or anywhere else in the Middle Eastern dispersion, they share the universal concerns regarding personal, family, racial, geopolitical and divine issues. Adolescents fret over love and computer games; frustrated writers worry about getting published and becoming famous, insecure politicians plot, vulnerable girls learn the ropes, childless spinsters mourn, failures harbor dreams of revenge…
One of the delightful things about discovering a book of this nature is the unexpected surprises which pop up out of nowhere, like “Godshow.com,” by Ahmed Naji — the story of a man looking for a mosque in Las Vegas. Curiously, that irreverent city has lots of mosques, but our subject is looking for one that feels just right. In the end he chooses one that seems to have the right vibrations, in which he provokes a special event, the appearance of a sacred flying Buruq. His friend, Phil, having lost his first wife and favorite uncle in the same year, was probably depressed. Phil clearly needs help, so his thoughtful friend tells him the story of the Buraq: “To cheer him up God sent Muhammad a Buraq, a heavenly creature with wings, smaller than a horse but larger than a donkey, who flew Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem, where he met and prayed with all the prophets who had come before him…” The Buraq that Phil’s generous benefactor conjures up flies overhead but turns out to be a balsa-wood imitation and comes crashing down. So much for spiritual enlightenment.
The bottom line of seems to have more to do with what we have in common than our differences. That, in itself, should be consoling. It’s just a question of having a friend capable of finding a place of worship with the right vibrations and, if necessary, a flying Buraq.
I want to leave you with a detail gleaned from the glossary at the back of the book. “Salam-Arabic: a form of greeting, literally “peace.” The Hebrew equivalent is “shalom.”
a review of Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction
Most of us are aware that the Palestinian people of Gaza are being treated like cattle in an abattoir at the hands of Israeli usurpers, who have called themselves “settlers” over the past eight decades. Those “settlers,” who revel in considering themselves victims while acting like mega-murderers, have used a surprise attack on Israelis by Palestinian opposition forces to justify a full-blown, ground-and-air-based genocide in their open-air concentration camp of Gaza, which contained more than two million Palestinians.
That indiscriminate genocide has been going on for 16 months, since October 7, 2023. Its victims are defenseless civilians, mainly women, children and the elderly. Such heinous persecution is aggravated by unlimited support of the Israeli aggressors by the United States, who supply an unending stream of arms, ordnance, intelligence and financing for the ongoing horror show. The Israelis cast this disproportionate campaign of mass murder as retribution for a Hamas surprise attack on the Israelis resulting in some 1,200 dead and 251 hostages. As of today, Feb. 21, 2025, Gaza's Government Media Office has updated Israel’s genocide death toll to at least 61,709 people, saying thousands of Palestinians missing under the rubble are now presumed dead. The UN estimates that the war has littered Gaza with at least 50 million tons of rubble — roughly 12 times the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. With more than 100 trucks working full time, it would take more than 15 years to clear the rubble. (Aljazeera)
We sympathize with those besieged Palestinians, but we don’t know them very well. Presumably they put their trousers on one leg at a time like the rest of us, but beyond that, we’re pretty much in the dark. Wouldn’t it be a luxury to be able to be better acquainted with them, their brothers and sisters, and their world? But how do we go about it? They’re over there; we’re over here. How do we establish contact. It’s not easy, but it’s now possible in small measure, thanks to a concerned editor with a genial idea, Jordan Elgrably, a native Californian of French and Moroccan heritage, currently resident in France, from where, with a multinational staff, he heads The Markaz Review (TMR), an online/offline project offering “Literature and Arts from the Center of the World.”
Elgrably put together a collection of short fiction from the Middle East and got it published by City Lights in San Francisco. That elegant gesture has shed light on the worlds of Middle Easterners today for all of us. Now we can all peer into their lives through their writing. The book is called Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction. What a cordial way to get to know the Palestinians and other Arabs, as well as Iranians, Afghans, Kurds, and immigrant communities who live in exile, in far-flung cities like London, Paris and Berlin.
The book sets the scene for us, opening with a double-page map of the Muslim world, out of which leap two overweening realizations:
1. Just what a huge area the Muslim world occupies, extending from Afghanistan and Pakistan on the east to the Moroccan Sahara on the west, a distance of almost 7,000 kilometers; and Sudan on the south and Turkey on the northeast, with almost half of the total area of the Muslim world in North Africa.
2. Just how miniscule is the area occupied by its perennial hotspot, the micro-mini states of Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. What keeps it “hot” are Israel’s ambitious territorial pretensions, backed up by the far-flung network of co-religionaries, in particular those of the United States, skillfully coordinated by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This pro-Israel lobbying group is influential beyond belief in American public life, with the power to bribe enough members of the United States Congress to do their bidding. This bribery of the world’s ostensibly most august legislative body may sound like science fiction, but it is not. It is the result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections. In the wake of that decision, the country—and the world—discovered just how venal American politicians are. When the Israeli prime minister—and notorious longtime mass murderer—Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Washington he is received with multiple standing ovations in joint sessions of the United States Congress. Nor is that enthusiasm tempered by the Israelis launching of a genocidal war against mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians, in Gaza and the West Bank.
With this rich backdrop in mind, let’s look at a noble effort to communicate some of today’s realities in the Muslim world, as seen by 25 of its writers of fiction who open for us 25 windows on their realities. The first thing the discerning reader notes is how much we have in common with the Palestinians. It seems we’re all in this together. We all have grandmothers and they’re all concerned about us and our future. We all have hopes and fears, projects and possibilities. We, the “us” of the West—which used to look privileged, but is beginning to look squalid—have more artificial intelligence, with all the irony that implies. Though many of the writers who have written these stories do not live in the Middle East. They have packed their memories and left. This we know thanks to the thoughtful editor who provides us with brief biographies of his authors. The first five on his list reside, respectively, in New York, Aberdeen, London, Oregon and Rome.
It's not unreasonable to guess that their stories are based on memories of former times. What prompted them to leave their homelands? That question is broached in more than one of the stories, including “Asha and Jaaji” by Hanif Kureishi, which is about two refugees, struggling together in London as cleaners who are social outcasts. What is noteworthy in many of them is their universality. Whether the author is writing from Egypt or Iran, or anywhere else in the Middle Eastern dispersion, they share the universal concerns regarding personal, family, racial, geopolitical and divine issues. Adolescents fret over love and computer games; frustrated writers worry about getting published and becoming famous, insecure politicians plot, vulnerable girls learn the ropes, childless spinsters mourn, failures harbor dreams of revenge…
One of the delightful things about discovering a book of this nature is the unexpected surprises which pop up out of nowhere, like “Godshow.com,” by Ahmed Naji — the story of a man looking for a mosque in Las Vegas. Curiously, that irreverent city has lots of mosques, but our subject is looking for one that feels just right. In the end he chooses one that seems to have the right vibrations, in which he provokes a special event, the appearance of a sacred flying Buruq. His friend, Phil, having lost his first wife and favorite uncle in the same year, was probably depressed. Phil clearly needs help, so his thoughtful friend tells him the story of the Buraq: “To cheer him up God sent Muhammad a Buraq, a heavenly creature with wings, smaller than a horse but larger than a donkey, who flew Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem, where he met and prayed with all the prophets who had come before him…” The Buraq that Phil’s generous benefactor conjures up flies overhead but turns out to be a balsa-wood imitation and comes crashing down. So much for spiritual enlightenment.
The bottom line of seems to have more to do with what we have in common than our differences. That, in itself, should be consoling. It’s just a question of having a friend capable of finding a place of worship with the right vibrations and, if necessary, a flying Buraq.
I want to leave you with a detail gleaned from the glossary at the back of the book. “Salam-Arabic: a form of greeting, literally “peace.” The Hebrew equivalent is “shalom.”
September 7, 2024
I love any collection of stories and this was a splendid one highlighting voices throughout the global Arab/Muslim world. In the best way possible—some of the shorter stories had me desperately wanting them to go on and find out more, while others had me clenching my jaw, wishing to know less but reading forward nevertheless. I marked my favorites in my book activity updates with the authors names, and you should at least check those out!
Additionally: I wish the formatting in the beginning describing a blurb for each story was done differently, more broken up and less of a big run on paragraph, and if y’all wanna find some great recommendation for other things to read, the “About the Writers and Translators” is pack full of these authors other works!
Additionally: I wish the formatting in the beginning describing a blurb for each story was done differently, more broken up and less of a big run on paragraph, and if y’all wanna find some great recommendation for other things to read, the “About the Writers and Translators” is pack full of these authors other works!
May 23, 2025
I feel like I say this with every book of short stories but it’s true. Some of these are great and others are meh. Some contain material that was a bit too vulgar for me and others were fine. I love being reminded through stories like this that while our traditions and cultures are different, the human experience is universal. We all share a need for home, we all want love and acceptance, and we all experience loss.
November 6, 2024
I really enjoyed this collection. It was refreshing to read one before bed at night and start clean the next day.
January 31, 2025
25 reminders of the beauty, depravity, and mystery of humanity, told by those from the center of the world.
September 12, 2025
A wide range of stories here, and probably most readers will find some that they like a lot and others not so much.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews