Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East (Comma City Stories) [Kindle Edition]

Madinah is a collection of ten short stories from ten middle eastern cities, edited by Joumana Haddad, the author of the story set in Beirut and the only female author of the ten. All but two of the stories are translated from the original Arabic, Turkish, or Hebrew.

Each of the ten stories centers around loneliness or some kind of loss, most of the protagonists missing someone they never had, instead of someone who went away. Least tortured are Istanbul's "The Award" by Nedim Gursel,, Akka's "The Passport" (Ala Hlehel) and Dubai's "The Week Before The Wife Arrived" (Fadwa al-Qasem). In "The Award", an award winning author is back in Istanbul for the first time since violent riots separated him from his girlfriend. "The Passport" centers around a man about to journey to Britain from Akka when war reaches his city, rendering his trip impossible; the reader shares his denial, his desperate criminal act, and his resignation to reality. In "The Week Before The Wife Arrived", a Jordanian man in Dubai copes with the staleness of his marriage by playing while the wife is away.

The other stories are sadder still. Tel Aviv's "Meningitis" (Yitzhak Laor) mourns a soldier who wasn't who people thought (and wasn't who the reader thought, either), through the eyes of the mentally ill, only son of a military-obsessed father. Alexandria's "Midnight on the Outside" (Gamal al-Ghitani) follows a young man to a new city, leaving his seaside small town (and a woman he loves) for employment, only to realize, broken, that he can never go back to her or his family. "There's No Room for a Lover in this City" by Yousef al-Mohaimeed is set in Riyadh, where men may not meet with women, and if they try, they may not recognize them through the niqab, so a man regresses to childhood animism and falls in love with an object instead. In Latakia ("City of Crimson," Nabil Sulayman) acts of violence and terrorism rob a man of his ability to love his wife and daughter, to recognize any emotion than hatred. In Elias Farkouh's "Amman's Birds Sweep Low", adults can explore and play together like they did when they were children, but when reality kicks in, their social classes divide them. In "The Reality and the Record," by Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi ambulance driver seeks refuge after being kidnapped and released by insurgents. His story was written for him when he was forced to appear in broadcast messages to the Americans, and now he must rewrite it for the officials who can give him a new life.

My favorite was "Living it Up (and Down) in Beirut", written by the editor, Joumana Haddad. The story is one of war and sex and passion and girlish dreams (and loneliness, again) but the language and style of the story telling is poetic and literary. We get to read Haddad's original words, as this is one of the only stories in the collection written in English and not requiring translation, so there isn't much of a filter between the author's pen and the reader's eyes. I read "Living it Up (and Down) in Beirut" first, because when I opened the book to the middle in the bookstore, it drew me in, but I would have read it last if I'd realized Haddad was miles ahead of the others in terms of maturity and talent.