Short stories
أربع عشرة قصة من مدينتي
Not translated into English
Kamel Maghur · 1982
Synopsis
Fourteen short stories set in Tripoli and among the people of its old quarters: a road, a balloon, the cowards, the wall, the birth, the oath, the last screening, the green crate, the dark passage. The titles, brief and concrete, announce stories told at street level; nothing more is known of them.
Context
The stories collected here are set in the alleys of the city where their author was born and where he died. They were written on the margins of a public life lived elsewhere, and the book says nothing of it: no affairs of state, no chancery, only people and streets. It is on these grounds that it counts in the history of the genre in Libya, and not as the pastime of a notable.
Who it is for
A collection of short stories in Arabic, not translated. The material is local and the places are named: it is better to know the old town a little.
Prizes and reception
Libyan critics regard this collection as the first to have set the country's short story on the right path, in form as much as in substance.