In 2014, Osama Alomar was working as a cab driver in Chicago when he learned that the suburb of Zamalka, just outside the heart of Syria’s capital, Damascus, had been destroyed by the fighting that continues to ravage his country. The apartment house that Alomar had lived in for five years before leaving for the United States, and everything in it—his furniture, clothing, guitar, and, most painfully, his library of old and rare books, including volumes he’d inherited from his father and grandfather—had been reduced to rubble. “I’m homesick, but I cannot go back,” he told me recently. “I would be homeless.”

Before he left Syria, in 2008, Alomar’s fiction and poetry had been published in four collections; he’d won literary prizes and had his work broadcast on the BBC. Now his entire personal archive was lost. “All my published poems, stories, interviews I had done in journals and magazines. Everything. I was completely shocked to learn that it was all gone,” he said. Also lost were the manuscripts of several writing projects in progress, including a completed autobiographical novel, called “The Jagged Years.”

The plan had been to establish himself as a writer in the United States, but it took Alomar six years to get a collection of his stories published in translation. “From the outside looking in—from a country like Syria—America looks like Heaven,” Alomar said. After he arrived, the relentless economic pressure startled him. He had not expected to encounter so much poverty and homelessness. “People have to work almost day and night to make their living,” he said. “It’s not easy at all. Everybody has to wake up early, too early, to work all day long.”

He saw them every morning, clutching their coffee, waiting for the El before dawn at the Rosemont station, the busiest transit station outside Chicago city limits. Alomar spent nine- and ten-hour days driving his cab; he typically arrived at the station by 5 or 6 A.M. to receive passengers. In the car, he kept an English-Arabic dictionary, a thesaurus, a few reference books, some American fiction, and a favorite edition of the work of Kahlil Gibran. Sometimes, his translator, C. J. Collins, rode around with him, too. While they waited for the next fare, they’d work on translating Alomar’s work into English. Line by line, they discussed grammar, idioms, tone, style. The result of their efforts, a collection titled “Fullblood Arabian,” was published by New Directions, in 2014. Lydia Davis wrote a preface. Alomar sold about eighty-five copies directly to passengers in his cab.

In April, New Directions published a second collection, “The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories.” Like “Fullblood Arabian,” it features a selection of stories that Collins translated from Alomar’s three Arabic collections. These are very short stories—they might be called flash fiction in the U.S., but in the Middle East they are known as _al-_qissa al-qasira jiddan. There, the genre has a rich, ancient history, and, in recent decades, repression and unrest have brought the style back into fashion. Very short stories can be published and circulated quickly; their political critique is often sharp but also oblique enough to evade censorship. Collins told me that there’s a “kind of Arabic literature that wins international prizes and gets translated quickly into English but that doesn’t reflect the popular literature.” By contrast, he said, “Osama’s work comes from the popular tradition. Even though his stuff gets billed as experimental over here, it was designed to have a popular appeal in the Arab world.”

Collins first encountered Alomar’s writing in 2006, while on a Fulbright in Syria. “I heard his stories spoken out loud before I actually read them,” he said. “These things were going viral in the age before viral videos.” Collins was supposed to be doing doctoral research on the history of French influence in the Middle East, but he discovered that Damascus’s literary scene interested him more than his dissertation topic did. He began attending a monthly literary salon held in the home of the feminist activist and writer Sahar Abu Harb. That’s where he met and befriended Alomar.

The short story is a “critical genre in Syrian literature,” Hanadi Al-Samman, a professor of modern Arabic literature at the University of Virginia, told me. In “Literature from the ‘Axis of Evil,’ ” an anthology compiled by Words Without Borders, Al-Samman explains that “Syria’s literary tradition has been greatly intertwined with its political background.” After the rise of the Baathist Party, in 1963, newspapers, books, media, and film became heavily censored. “In the face of threats of persecution or imprisonment,” according to Al-Samman, Syrian writers “had to make a choice between living a life of artistic freedom in exile . . . or resorting to subversive modes of expression that seemingly comply with the authoritarian police state while undermining and questioning the legitimacy of its rule through subtle literary techniques.”

Alomar, in a sense, chose both. Though he never mentions specific countries or heads of state by name—more than one of his Syrian writer friends who dared to do so were tortured or went missing—many of his stories are overtly political. One titled “Free Elections” is, in English, just more than thirty words long: “When the slaves reelected their executioner entirely of their own accord and without any pressure from anyone, I understood that it was still very early to be talking about democracy and human dignity.” Another, titled “A Handkerchief of Freedom,” reads even more like a fable: “The dictator sneezed. He pulled Freedom from his pants pocket and blew his nose. Then he threw her away in the wastebasket.”

Other stories are more opaque. Animals—dogs, horses, and wolves—take on leading roles, as do all manner of inanimate objects. Clocks shout slogans, lightning taunts thunder, flutes envy cannons, days of the week bicker. A story titled “A Flag of Surrender” could be about many things, both political and personal: “A thorn daringly pierced a jasmine petal and felt proud. She didn’t realize that in so doing she had become a flag of surrender.”

On the phone, Alomar quickly rattled off his topics of choice to me: “human dignity, human rights, happiness, success, failure, equality, inequality, tolerance.” Given how essential both brevity and ambiguity are to his style, translation can be particularly difficult. “There’s not a lot of room to get a single word wrong,” Collins said. Despite their punchiness and precision, the stories can make for challenging reading as well. “You can’t tune out for a moment,” Collins told me. “You have to catch every word.”

Alomar lives in Pittsburgh now, through a yearlong residency funded by the Pittsburgh City of Asylum program. (After abandoning his doctoral studies, Collins became a librarian and settled in Canada.) He finally has time to rest, to think, and, of course, to write—on his own terms. “I’m not like an employee at my desk,” he said. “I write where I want. In my bed. Outside. In the park. In a café.”

But the freedom and peace of mind that he thought he might find in the U.S. when he left Syria, all those years ago, still eludes him. “When I woke up on the morning of November 9th and found out the results of the election, I felt like I had traveled backwards hundreds of years,” Alomar wrote in a short essay published in Sampsonia Way magazine, a publication of the City of Asylum program, shortly after the election. “Is the future walking with firm footsteps towards the dark corridors of the past, holding high the banner of intolerance and hate?”

After nearly a decade in the U.S., Alomar has yet to write fiction set in this country. “I couldn’t write a word about my experience as a cab driver,” he told me. “Maybe because I hated it so much, I couldn’t get any inspiration.” After his year in Pittsburgh, his plans aren’t certain. For now, he’s working on a novel about the Syrian War.

Collins, for his part, does not romanticize Alomar’s time as a cab driver, but he does think back on the long hours they spent in the car with a certain fondness. “It’s kind of an amazing thing and an exciting thing, to be able to take the work of an author you admire and sit with the author and ask him, ‘What did you mean here, what’s that word about?’ He’s so clearly, totally dedicated to his craft. I haven’t been around many people like that.” Still, watching Alomar’s career up close has been sobering. “It’s been an eye-opener, seeing just how few people make a living as writers,” Collins said. “I hope he’ll find something more nourishing and valorizing than driving a taxicab.”